Malick Sidibé - Chemises - 2007

Malick Sidibé Chemises. Published in 2007 by Steidl. A facsimile scrapbook. Hundreds of small print photographs as Sidibe had them presented in his studio and from which he would make selects and an edit.

First edition. Softcover. In good condition. The back cover is slightly wavy in the upper left corner. 25 x 33 cm. 154 pages.

Chemises takes its subject from the edges of Malick Sidibé's archive rather than its center: the plain cardboard folders — chemises, French for both "shirts" and "folders" — in which he handed Bamako clients their prints and negatives from the 1960s through the 1970s.
Stamped, labeled, and worn from handling, these folders carried the ordinary bureaucratic marks of a working studio: order numbers, customer names, dates. Steidl designed the book itself to mimic that object. The volume reads as a photograph album with prints pasted directly onto its pages, rather than a conventional plate-by-plate monograph. It was published in 2007 to accompany an exhibition co-presented by Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, and it shifts attention from the nightlife and portrait images for which Sidibé is best known toward the material culture and everyday economy of studio photography in Bamako.