Sanlé Sory (1943–2023) - Le Boxer

Stamped and signed.

Sory Sanlé is a Burkinabé photographer, born in 1943 in Nianiagara in the Republic of Upper Volta.
Ibrahima Sanlé Sory arrived in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1957. Having become a journalist and photographer, he also produces illustrations for album covers.
He opens his Volta Photo studio in 1962, as his country gains independence. He buys a Rolleiflex 6×6, and begins by taking identity photographs and photographs of road accidents for the local police.
Rapidly, he rises to notoriety in Bobo-Dioulasso, which was then the cultural and economic capital of the former Haute-Volta, and where young Africans ‘hungry for modernity’ came to ‘have their portrait taken.’
Recorded between 1960 and 1985, his photographic work ‘testifies to the happiness of a freedom regained and to a social and cultural effervescence unique in its kind.’

Exhibitions
2015: Folk art African?, Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
2015: À la rencontre de la photographie africaine, médiathèque de Mérignac.
2018: Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago.
2020: Tête à Têtes - West African Portraiture from Independence into the 21st Century, David Hill Gallery, London.
2020: Bobo Yéyé, Sanlé Sory, Galerie du Château d’Eau, Toulouse.
Photograph accompanied by an authenticity certificate (Galerie Art-Z, Paris), signed by the photographer.