Pioneering Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, whose powerful black and white images of local life won him global fame and top awards, has died aged 80, his family said on Friday.
Sidibe’s vibrant images of life in the Malian capital Bamako in the 1960s, when the country gained independence from France, were a social commentary chronicling both pop culture and traditional society.
In 2007, he was the first African and the first photographer to be awarded the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice film festival. “It’s a great loss for Mali. He was part of our cultural heritage,” said Mali’s Culture Minister N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo.
“The whole of Mali is in mourning,” Diallo said. Sidibe was the first African to have a solo exhibition in Paris’s prestigious Grand Palais museum, and his works adorn the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty Museum and several other leading museums across the world.