Tidiani Shitou (1933–2000) - Les soeurs

Through the names of Seydou Keita or Malik Sidibé, African photography in the West has popularized a human-centered image that highlights the popularity of photographic studios from the 1960s to the 1990s. But a multitude of other photographers, who also worked in studio, remain to be discovered. And for the first time in Lyon, an art and photography gallery offers this possibility. The astonishing images of the doppelgänger of the Malian artist Tidiani Shitou (1933-2000) originate from the artistic and cultural specificities of West Africa. Formal specifics: think of symmetry, hieraticness and the contained energy of statuary, and symbolic specificities. His double portraits, portraits of parents, friends, far from being limited to depicting a sentiment of fraternal love badenya (born of the same mother), convey other types of affectionate relations between individuals. They underscore the deep bond that unites two people. The photographer’s art lies in translating this bond through symbolic resemblance, by intensifying the similarity between them through pose, clothing (sometimes lent), accessories, the symmetry of the composition, up to creating the illusion of total identification, of a shared doubling. His portraits thus celebrate a relationship while representing it, using symbols: stereotyped twin images that are also found in sculpture and in many other everyday objects in West Africa. They are not the immediate, realistic image of the individuals but rather the illumination of the person’s duality and the ideal model that the founder twin couple constitutes in the original myths. Protected by the gods, the twins (though sometimes seen as malevolent) bring happiness and symbolize harmony and fairness. They are a reminiscence of the origins of the world and they feed a very fertile imagination in sub-Saharan Africa. The idea that each one is in search of his alter ego, his complementary soul mate - his twin - constitutes a very popular theme in West Africa: the double portrait often likened to a twin portrait. A portrait in which the individual does not disappear in favor of the double but, on the contrary, grows with his split image. Tidiani Shitou demonstrates, in portraits of great historical, ethnographic and artistic value, that a resolutely contemporary aesthetics can be put at the service of traditional thought. He also shows that, thanks to photography, clients have been able to reclaim their image, even recreate it, by playing with the different layers of their realities and by inventing their own modernity and their history. An idea drives this 'image-maker' who stands between the visible and the invisible: to manage, through mastery of an appropriate medium, to render the mental image of a radical duality of the person. C. Angelo Micheli El Hadj Tidiani SHITOU (1933 - 2000) Studio Photo Kodak Olore, Mopti, Mali Tidiani Shitou, long regarded as the best photographer in his region, produced from the 1970s to 2000, in his Studio Photo Gangal in Mopti, a considerable body of work. It comprises portraits as well as images of celebrations and ceremonies shot in black and white and then in color. Yoruba born in Nigeria, he was first a tailor and a merchant. In Mali, from the late 1950s, he stopped in Gao in 1962 where he trained under Nigerian photographer Mahamane Awani, then in Bamako where he connected with Malick Sidibé, before arriving in Mopti. There he continued his training alongside Malian photographer Bosco Maïga and opened his studio in 1971. But curious about everything, he never ceased traveling across sub-Saharan Africa to absorb new ideas from contact with photographers and artists. His keen, gentle, amused gaze rested on his fellow citizens in a wide variety of portraits. The Fulani, Bozo, Dogon, Sarakolé, Bella and Yoruba came to the Studio Photo Kodak of Mopti (a very commercial city at the crossroads of the routes to Djenné, Timbuktu and the Dogon country) for the diversity of poses, the numerous accessories provided, and the quality of the images. At the crossroads of models drawn from Western studio photography and a local traditional heritage, he spread his knowledge in Mali. He is certainly one of the great promoters of the Ibeji portrait, a portrait duplicated by superimposition developed by the Yoruba within the framework of the twins cult. He used 6x6 cameras, then a single-lens reflex for color. If his portraits today testify to the elegance and whimsy of an era, if they are rich historical and anthropological documents on cultures, they are above all the reflection of an artistic work tied to the dreams of the models who aspired to another ideal reality. Some of Shitou’s photographs have entered private collections and the Sokkelund Museum in Copenhagen. They were shown at the Bamako Photography Encounters in 2001 and at the Indiana University Art Museum in April 2007. C. Angelo Micheli