Publisher's Description
You've almost surely never heard of Sanlé Sory. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was a neighborhood studio photographer in what was then called Upper Volta, one of only three or four in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. He worked in (as he recalled in a recent interview) 'the second building in the whole neighborhood to have a modern roof and a backyard.' There he made lively portraits of his customers with inexpensive fabric backdrops and props, often jokily posed as pop stars or world travelers. Over three decades, he created a huge body of work, exuberant pictures free of artistic preciousness but made with care. They form a sweet, intensively transporting document of everyday life in a rapidly changing place, as French Upper Volta became independent Burkina Faso, as pop-culture and fashion trends waxed and waned. Studio Volta Photo, a limited edition book of Sory's iconic studio portraiture dating from the 1960s - 80s. Featuring never before seen images curated from the photographer's archive of vintage negatives, Studio Volta Photo is produced in a limited run of 500 copies.
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