Malick Sidibé Danseur Méringué (Merengue Dancer) 1964/2008

African and African Diaspora

Malick Sidibé was one of the first African photographers to take his camera out of the studio, frequenting the legendary house parties and street gatherings that comprised the vibrant nightlife of Bamako, Mali, in the 1960s and 1970s. In image after image, he vividly captures the sense of exhilaration that reverberated throughout the capital city during the early years of the country’s independence, as a new, modern national identity took shape following more than 60 years of French colonial rule. Sidibé’s photographs reveal the important role Western popular music and fashion played in this context, transforming the country’s urban youth culture. The prominence of figures like James Brown, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, and other British and North American icons—and of bell-bottom jeans, leather jackets, leisure suits, and patterned dresses—engenders a pointed irony. In Sidibé’s words, “While there is an implicit contradiction in the embrace of international music after a long struggle for independence from outside control, in Mali that embrace was marked by a new autonomy and agency that had not existed before.” At the same time that it celebrates universal human values, such as the exuberance of youth and the yearning for freedom, Sidibé’s work serves as a record of these nuanced social dynamics, indicating the complexity of the historian’s task in the age of globalization.

Identification

Title

Danseur Méringué (Merengue Dancer)

Production Date

1964/2008

Object Number

2014.116

Credit Line

Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase

https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2014.116

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Physical Qualities

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

24 x 19 3/4 inches

Visual Description

‘Danseur mérengué’ or ‘Merengue Dancer’ by Malick Sidibe is a gelatin silver print that stands vertically at two feet tall by nineteen and three-quarters inches wide. In the center of the photo, we see a young Black man captured mid dance. His knees are bent, with one arm raised in the air and bent at the elbow with hand open near his head. His other arm is bent towards his body, hand in a closed fist. He faces away from us to our left, with a wide grin and eyes shut. The dancing man is wearing a white button up shirt. He wears a dark, striped tie that has been loosened along with the first buttons of his collared shirt. He has dark trousers with a black belt and dark pointed leather shoes. His body is also turned away slightly to our left, leading the eye to a set of clapping hands peeking into the frame on our left. The anonymous hands are accompanied only by a bent knee that appears in the bottom left corner wearing a dark dress with a repeating geometric pattern. The setting is small and appears to be inside of someone’s home, with our protagonist dancing in a curtained doorway and another room packed with party-goers behind him. In this room behind him are least half a dozen other guests, packed so tightly that it is hard to discern how many there are exactly. A woman directly behind the dancing man, wearing a white dress with matching headdress looks on with slightly downward gaze and a wide smile. Next to her left we see the back of another man wearing a linen suit facing away from us, and behind the woman wearing white, we see another woman with short hair looking towards the left to other party guests with a smile.

Malick Sidibé

Malick Sidibé — b. 1935, Soloba, Mali; d. 2016, Bamako, Mali
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