Malick Sidibé @ Jack Shainman

all images © Malick Sidibé

Currentluy on view at Jack Shainman

thru 5AUG

It is clear from Sidibé’s photographs that what the youth in Bamako wanted most in those days was James Brown and the freedom and existential subjectivity that linked independence to the universal youth movement of the 1960s…. These photographs are speaking to me now, not only as important aesthetic documents on the culture of the 1960s, but also as documents that both problematize the narrow meaning of nationalism extent at that time, and open the door for Pan-African and diasporic aesthetics through rock and roll.

-Manthia Diawara

(via)