Sanlé Sory

Sanlé Sory (born 1943, Nianiagara, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè photographer based in Bobo-Dioulasso. Working primarily in photography, Sory’s practice documents youth culture, nightlife, portraiture, and everyday life in post-independence Burkina Faso. His work is characterized by vibrant studio portraiture and dynamic images of social life that capture style, freedom, and self-fashioning in the 1960s and 1970s. After learning photography through apprenticeship, including how to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera and process prints, Sory opened his studio, Volta Photo, in 1960, the same year Upper Volta began its transition to independence.  Through Volta Photo and his photographs of clubs, concerts, and bals poussières (“dust balls”), Sory created a vivid visual record of a generation shaping new forms of identity and modernity. His portraits foreground music, fashion, and performance while also preserving an important social history of the period. In recent years, his work has received major international recognition through solo exhibitions including Volta Photo at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018), Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty Country of Burkina Faso at the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (2019), and Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2020).  His photographs are held in significant collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Sory continues to live and work in Bobo-Dioulasso.