Tidiani Shitou (1933–2000) - Toi et moi (1975)

Silver print - Signed

Through the names of Seydou Keita or Malik Sidibé, a African photography in which the human figure is preponderant and that highlights the popularity of photography studios from the 1960s to the 1990s has become popular in the West. But a multitude of other photographers, working also in studio, remains to be discovered. And it is the first time, in Lyon, that an art and photography gallery offers this possibility. The astonishing images of the double of the Malian artist Tidiani Shitou (1933-2000) draw their source from the artistic and cultural specificities of West Africa. Formal specificities: think of symmetries, of hieraticism and the contained energy of statuary, and symbolic specificities. His double portraits, portraits of parents, of friends, far from being restricted to depicting a feeling of fraternal love badenya (born of the same mother), translate other types of affective relationships between individuals. They emphasize the deep bond that unites two people. The photographer’s art lies in translating this bond through symbolic likeness, by exaggerating the similarity between them through pose, clothing (sometimes borrowed), accessories, the symmetry of the composition, until creating the illusion of total identification, of a single doubled self. His portraits then celebrate a relationship while at the same time representing it, using symbols: stereotyped twin-like images that are also found in sculpture and in many other everyday objects in West Africa. They are not the immediate and realistic image of the individuals but rather the illumination of the duality of the person and the ideal model that the founder twin in the original myths constitutes. Protected by the gods, the twins (though sometimes seen as evil) 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. This idea that everyone is searching for their alter ego, their complementary soul-mate – their twin – constitutes the very popular theme in West Africa of the double portrait often equated with a twin portrait. A portrait in which the individual does not disappear in favor of the double but, on the contrary, increases through the doubling. Tidiani Shitou shows, in portraits of great historical, ethnological and artistic value, that a decidedly contemporary aesthetics can be put at the service of traditional thought. He also shows that, thanks to photography, clients could reclaim their image, or even recreate it, by playing with different strata of their realities and by inventing their own modernity and their history. An idea animates this “image-maker,” a mediator between the visible and the invisible: to achieve, with mastery of an adequate medium, the figure of 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 oeuvre. It consists of portraits but also of festive and ceremonial images made in black and white and then in color. Yoruba born in Nigeria, he first was a tailor and a trader. In Mali from the late 1950s, he stopped in Gao in 1962 where he was trained by the Nigerian photographer Mahamane Awani, then in Bamako where he linked with Malick Sidibé, before arriving in Mopti. There he continued his training alongside the Malian photographer Bosco Maïga and opened his studio in 1971. But curious about everything, he never ceased to travel sub-Saharan Africa to absorb new ideas in contact with photographers and artists. His keen, gentle, and amused gaze settled on his fellow citizens in a wide variety of portraits. The Fulani, the Bozo, the Dogon, the Sarakole, the Bella and the Yoruba came to the Mopti Kodak Photo Studio (a very commercial city at the crossroads of the Djenné, Timbuktu and Dogon country routes) for the diversity of poses, the many accessories provided and the quality of the images. At the crossroads of models from Western studio photography and a local traditional heritage, he spread his knowledge in Mali. He is certainly one of the great propagators of the Ibeji portrait, a double portrait created by superimposition developed by the Yoruba in the context of the cult of twins. He used 6x6 cameras and then a single-lens reflex for color. If his portraits today testify to the elegance and whimsy of a particular era, if they are rich historical and anthropological documents on cultures, they are above all the reflection of an artistic work associated with the dreams of models who aspired to another ideal reality. Some photographs by Shitou have entered private collections and the Sokkelund Museum in Copenhagen. They were presented at the Bamako Photography Encounters in 2001 and at the Indiana University Art Museum in April 2007. C. Angelo Micheli