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

Silver print - Signed

Through the names of Seydou Keita or Malik Sidibé, a African photography has become popular in the West where the human figure is preeminent and highlights the popularity of photography studios from the 1960s to the 1990s. But a multitude of other photographers, also working in studio, remain to be discovered. And this is the first time, in Lyon, that 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 specificities: think of symmetries, hieraticness and the contained energy of statuary, and symbolic specificities. His double portraits, portraits of parents, of friends, far from restricting themselves to depicting a sentiment of fraternal love (born of the same mother), convey other types of affective relations between individuals. They emphasize the deep bond that unites two people. The photographer’s art lies in translating this bond through symbolic likeness, by intensifying the similarity between them through pose, clothing (sometimes borrowed), accessories, the symmetry of the composition, up to creating the illusion of total identification, of a same doubled self. His portraits then 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 and realistic image of the individuals but the highlighting of the person’s duality and the ideal model that the founding twin couple represents in the origin myths. Protected by the gods, the twins (though sometimes seen as malevolent) bring good luck 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 person is seeking their alter ego, their complementary soulmate – 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, grows with their doubling. Tidiani Shitou demonstrates, in portraits of great historical, ethnological and artistic value, that a resolutely contemporary aesthetic 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 the different layers of their realities and by inventing their own modernity and their history. A narrative animates this intermediary “image maker” between the visible and the invisible: to achieve, through mastery of an appropriate medium, a figurative rendering 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 the year 2000, at his Studio Photo Gangal in Mopti, a substantial body of work. It consists of portraits but also of images of celebrations and ceremonies, made in black and white and then in color. Yoruba born in Nigeria, he had first been a tailor and a merchant. In Mali since the late 1950s, he settled in Gao in 1962 where he was trained by the Nigerian photographer Mahamane Awani, then in Bamako where he linked up 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 stopped roaming sub-Saharan Africa to absorb new ideas in contact with photographers and artists. His keen, gentle and amused gaze rested 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 made available to them, and the quality of the images. At the crossroads of models derived from Western studio photography and a local traditional heritage, he disseminated his knowledge in Mali. He is certainly one of the great promoters of the Ibeji portrait, a portrait doubled by superimposition developed by the Yoruba within the cult of twins. He used 6x6 cameras and then a SLR 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 the models who aspired to another ideal reality. A few 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