Malick Sidibé Un Monsieur bien cravaté (A Well-Dressed Man) 1975/2001
© Malik Sidibé. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
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
Un Monsieur bien cravaté (A Well-Dressed Man)
Production Date
1975/2001
Object Number
2014.117
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase
Copyright
© Malik Sidibé. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2014.117
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Gelatin silver print on board
Dimensions
23 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches
Visual Description
Malick Sidibé’s ‘Un monsieur bien cravaté’ or ‘A Well-Dressed Man’ is a gelatin silver print on board.
The print is almost square, standing vertically at roughly two feet tall and just short of two feet wide. The bottom edge of the print is signed in cursive handwriting with the title of the print to the far left, date in the center, and artist’s signature to the right.
This black and white photo, first captured in nineteen seventy-five, shows a young, slender Black man in a three-piece suit in the front and center.
The backdrop appears to be the corner of a room, with seams that meet to the right of the figure. The walls are a light color, and have plenty of scuff marks at human height. In some sections, the paint is chipped, revealing white underneath. The floor is covered in tile with a dark, decorative repeating pattern. There is a slight step that extends about a foot away from the bottom ledge of the wall, behind the figure as well.
The young subject wears a black three-piece suit and his blazer is open, revealing a fitted vest beneath, a black tie, and a snug white collar framing his jaw. He is clean shaven, with hair that is short, perhaps an inch tall at most. His tight natural curls are combed with a neat side part to our right. His expression is calm, with just a hint of a slight smile. He stands with one leg propped up on a short, trapezoidal-shaped stone that is light in color with a darkly painted crisscross pattern, with his black leather shoe sitting straight across the stone’s flat top. In modern contrapposto, his weight rests on the leg standing straight to our right as he counterbalances with a slight sway to the opposing, propped leg. The young man has one hand atop the propped knee, fingers fanned out, and another resting flat across his hip, brandishing a square timepiece on his left wrist.
