Studio Bamako
PhotoVOGUE - VOGUE Italia


During the last decades photography has changed. Since it got digital and especially since everybody uses smartphones, people take photographs every day. In former times you had to go to a photographic studio to get a picture of you and your family. Pictures were printed, not just displayed. And as there were only few of them, people were looking at the same pictures for years. While taking pictures got democratized, the worth of a photograph decreased.

A few years ago we travelled through southern Africa. To cross the border from the Kingdom of Swaziland to Mozambique we had to get passport photographs for our visa. So we went to an old fashioned photo studio to get some portrait shots. It was like entering a forgotten world. The camera which was used by the friendly photographer looked like one of the models you might have seen in a photography museum. We had to pose in front of a curtain and after the shooting we had to wait one hour for the images to develop.

Back home we found similar pictures in Feli´s family album. His father is from Algeria, North Africa, and there are only few images he preserves, most of them taken in a similar surrounding.

Then we went to Paris to see the exhibitions of Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, two photographers from Mali, Africa. Sidibé and Keïta are famous for their portrait photography in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the years after Mali´s independence. We were very impressed by the beautiful and expressive images and by the plain and simple sets they used in their studios. Their photographs reminded us of our photo session in Swaziland. The idea for our story was born. We call it „Studio Bamako“, for Bamako is the capital of Mali.

We are very happy to have Hair and Make-up artist Claudia Creuels in our team. She travelled the world for photo shootings and learned to work with african hair in South Africa.
The kids in our story loved to be dressed up and get styled like a modern version of their grandparents for a photo album shooting.

This story is dedicated to what people photography used to be.

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