A celebration of movement and modernity captured in Sanlé Sory Photography. In this iconic black-and-white photograph titled Je vais décoller, a well-dressed man poses against a painted aviation backdrop.
Discover how Sanlé Sory Photography transformed African portraiture, challenged external representations, and gave ordinary people control of their image.
BY KAZEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON
From the streets and dance halls of Bobo-Dioulasso to the imagined airport of a painted studio backdrop, Sanlé Sory photographed a generation determined to define itself. His portraits reveal how photography became an expression of identity, freedom, and post-independence aspiration in Burkina Faso. Today, Sanlé Sory Photography offers an extraordinary visual record of a society discovering new ways to express its cultural identity and imagine its future.
A man stands before a painted airplane, its doors open as though a flight is about to depart. He looks directly at the camera. His posture conveys confidence and anticipation. Behind him, the imagined airport suggests a world of possibilities.
The photograph, titled Je vais décoller (I’m Taking Off), dates to 1977. Its subject remains unnamed, but his presence is commanding. He does not look like someone waiting for permission to enter the future. He looks ready to claim it.
Nostalgic Glimpse of 1970s West Africa
Nearly five decades later, the photograph offers more than a nostalgic glimpse of 1970s West Africa. It raises an enduring question about who gets to define modernity and how ordinary people participate in shaping their own historical image.
The photograph is now the subject of a 2026 limited edition from Phaidon. Yet its significance extends well beyond the art market. It belongs to a remarkable photographic history created by Burkina Faso photographer Sanlé Sory. His work documented a society negotiating independence, cultural change, and new forms of self-expression.
At a time when African photography receives increasing attention from museums and international exhibitions, Sory’s archive offers an important perspective. It places the people of Bobo-Dioulasso at the center of their own story. More importantly, it demonstrates why Sanlé Sory Photography deserves recognition as an essential contribution to the history of African portraiture.
Sanlé Sory Photography: An Act of Self-Definition
Born in 1943, Sanlé Sory established his Volta Photo studio in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960. The year was significant. Upper Volta, as Burkina Faso was then known, gained independence from France. Sory was still a teenager when he opened the studio. He would go on to build a photographic practice that documented the lives, aspirations, and changing cultural tastes of his community over more than six decades.
His achievement was not simply the accumulation of portraits. It was the creation of a visual record in which people determined how they wished to appear. At Volta Photo, clients arrived with ideas about their appearance. They selected clothing, accessories, poses, and sometimes props. Sory provided the camera, technical expertise, and carefully constructed setting. The resulting photographs emerged from an exchange between photographer and sitter.
This relationship matters. Studio photography can become an exercise in documenting how a photographer sees another person. Sory’s approach allowed his subjects to participate in constructing their own representation. A fashionable young man could present himself as cosmopolitan. A couple could commemorate their relationship. Friends could demonstrate their closeness. A musician could project the confidence of a performer. The studio became a place where people could experiment with identity.
This understanding challenges the assumption that historical African photography should primarily serve as ethnographic evidence. Sory’s photographs are historical documents, but they also record individual choice, imagination, and self-fashioning. The people before his camera were not merely witnesses to history. They were active participants in its visual creation.
This commitment to personal expression is central to Sanlé Sory Photography. Rather than imposing an external interpretation of his community, Sory created a space in which individuals could shape how future generations would see them.
The Painted Aeroplane and the Imagination of a New Future
In Je vais décoller, the painted aeroplane backdrop does much more than establish a setting. It introduces an idea. The aircraft evokes international travel, technological progress, and the possibility of movement beyond familiar surroundings. Its open doors suggest that departure is possible. The sitter’s confident posture reinforces this impression.
However, the image does not require viewers to assume that the man intends to travel. Its power lies in the relationship between the imagined setting and the sitter’s chosen presentation. The aeroplane is a constructed image of modernity. The subject makes it personal.
This is one of the defining qualities of Sory’s studio photography. His backdrops created opportunities for imaginative encounters between everyday life and larger cultural aspirations. They could suggest distant cities, fashionable leisure, or unfamiliar landscapes. Yet the people who entered these imagined environments remained firmly in control of their photographic presence.
The result is neither straightforward documentary photography nor simple theatrical escapism. It is a visual negotiation between reality and possibility. In this sense, Je vais décoller captures something larger than the optimism associated with its period. It reveals how people use images to imagine who they might become.
The photograph also illustrates a defining characteristic of Sanlé Sory Photography: the ability to transform an ordinary studio portrait into a statement about aspiration, possibility, and individual agency.
Bobo-Dioulasso: The Cultural Foundations of Sanlé Sory Photography
Understanding Sory’s work requires looking beyond the photographic studio. Bobo-Dioulasso was an important center of commercial and cultural activity in Burkina Faso. Its music venues, markets, social gatherings, and emerging youth cultures provided the setting for a changing society.
Sory documented these environments alongside his studio portraits. His photographs captured dancers, musicians, market traders, sporting events, and community celebrations. His relationship with the city’s music scene was particularly significant.
He photographed Volta Jazz, an influential musical group founded by Idrissa Koné. His images appeared on record covers, connecting photography with popular music and the visual identity of a new generation. The photographer also documented bals poussières, or dust-ball dances. These gatherings brought people together in open spaces, where music and dancing created opportunities for social interaction and self-expression.
His photographs preserve the atmosphere of these events. They also reveal how fashion, music, and public performance contributed to a distinct cultural identity. The significance of this archive lies partly in its breadth. Sory did not restrict his attention to political leaders, celebrated personalities, or major historical events.
He photographed the people who made the city function and gave it character. Their clothing, hairstyles, gestures, and social interactions offer an intimate account of a society changing from within.
By documenting these different aspects of everyday life, Sanlé Sory Photography became a record of cultural transformation. His images preserve not simply what people looked like, but how they gathered, celebrated, performed, and expressed their place in a rapidly changing society.
Beyond the Colonial Gaze: Sanlé Sory Photography and the Politics of Representation
Sory’s work contributes to a broader reassessment of African photographic history. For much of photography’s colonial history, European photographers and institutions controlled the production and circulation of images depicting African people. Such images frequently reflected external assumptions about identity, culture, and social difference.
Independent African photographers offered another perspective. Working within their own communities, photographers such as Sory, Malick Sidibé, and Seydou Keïta created portraits that reflected the interests and aspirations of the people they photographed.
Their practices differed, but their work helped establish studio portraiture as an important form of cultural expression in West Africa. Sory’s photographs are especially compelling because of their relationship with everyday self-presentation. His subjects could choose how to appear rather than accept a predetermined visual identity.
This makes his archive relevant to contemporary discussions about representation and photographic agency. A useful contemporary comparison is Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop. His carefully constructed portraits examine African identity, historical representation, and the politics of visibility.
Diop works in a different historical and artistic context. Yet his practice shares an important concern with Sory’s: the power of photography to challenge established narratives and give individuals greater control over their representation. This conversation also connects with the wider development of African artists working across different disciplines.
Within this broader history, Sanlé Sory Photography represents an important shift in perspective. His portraits demonstrate that African photographic history cannot be understood solely through the images produced by outsiders. It must also recognize the photographers and communities who shaped their own visual narratives.
From Black-and-White Portraits to the Overlooked Color Archive
Although Sory became internationally recognized for his black-and-white portraits, his photographic practice extended further. He began producing color portraits at Volta Photo in the mid-1980s. These images offer another perspective on the people and communities he documented.
The color photographs reveal changing fashions, commercial activity, and everyday relationships. They also expand the visual vocabulary of an archive often associated with the distinctive monochromatic aesthetic of his earlier work. This lesser-known chapter is receiving renewed attention through Sanlé Sory: Colour Years at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
Running through February 21, 2027, the exhibition presents restored color prints made from negatives preserved in Sory’s archive. It also includes Volta Jazz record covers featuring his portraits of influential musicians. Curated by art historian and photography curator Taous Dahmani, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider the photographer’s career.
Rather than treating his black-and-white portraits as the definitive expression of his practice, it reveals a photographer whose visual language evolved alongside his community. The exhibition also reinforces the importance of photographic archives. Preserved negatives can reveal new dimensions of an artist’s work long after the original photographs were made.
For audiences familiar primarily with his earlier portraits, this collection provides a valuable opportunity to appreciate the full range of Sanlé Sory Photography. It demonstrates how his artistic approach developed alongside changing technologies, fashions, and cultural interests.
Sanlé Sory’s Growing Place in International Photography
Sory’s increasing international recognition reflects a broader interest in African photographic histories. His photographs have appeared in major exhibitions and entered important museum collections. The Art Institute of Chicago presented Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in 2018, bringing together photographs and material associated with his studio practice.
His work has also attracted sustained attention from international curators, publishers, and collectors. These presentations have helped establish his importance within the history of twentieth-century photography. They have also encouraged audiences to look beyond familiar narratives about African art and recognize the sophistication of local photographic practices.
The growing attention raises questions about how photographic archives acquire international value. For decades, much of Sory’s work remained closely connected to his community and personal archive. Its subsequent international circulation introduced new audiences to photographs that had already carried meaning for the people who originally commissioned them.
The challenge for museums, publishers, and collectors is to preserve that original context. These images should not become detached examples of an attractive vintage aesthetic. Their historical importance depends on understanding the people, relationships, and cultural circumstances that produced them.
The international recognition of Sanlé Sory Photography is therefore significant for reasons beyond the art market. It encourages a more inclusive understanding of photographic history, one that recognizes the cultural contributions of African photographers and the communities whose lives they documented.
Phaidon Revisits Sanlé Sory’s Photography Through a Portrait of Possibility
Phaidon has brought renewed attention to this history with its limited-edition release of Sanlé Sory, Je vais décoller, 1977/2026. The edition presents the original 1977 photograph as a signed and numbered digital print on 350 gsm paper. Measuring approximately 22 × 22 cm, it is limited to 30 numbered prints, accompanied by six artist’s proofs.
Each edition also includes a copy of Phaidon’s monograph Sanlé Sory, produced in collaboration with the photographer. The publication includes a contribution from Dr Taous Dahmani, whose research examines photography within its wider cultural and historical contexts.
The print and accompanying book offer collectors an opportunity to engage with both an individual photograph and the wider body of work behind it. Nevertheless, the photograph’s importance does not depend on its scarcity or commercial presentation.
Its lasting appeal comes from the relationship between the sitter, the imagined aircraft, and the photographer’s understanding of portraiture. Together, they produce an image that remains open to interpretation. Phaidon describes the photograph as embodying the optimism that runs through Sory’s work. The artist has also explained the broader intention behind his archive, describing the people of Bobo-Dioulasso as “the stars of their own existence.”
That statement offers an especially useful way to understand Je vais décoller. The sitter is not simply posing in front of an aeroplane. He occupies the centre of a world that he helps construct.
The photograph also encapsulates what makes Sanlé Sory Photography so compelling. Its significance lies not only in the photographer’s technical skill or artistic vision, but in his ability to create images that give ordinary people an opportunity to express their ambitions and define their own identities.
The Enduring Significance of Sanlé Sory Photography
The importance of Sanlé Sory’s work extends beyond its historical record of Burkina Faso. His photographs demonstrate the power of portraiture to preserve personal identities while documenting wider cultural transformations. They show how ordinary people responded to new social possibilities through fashion, music, leisure, and self-expression.
They also offer an alternative way of understanding modern African history. Rather than concentrating exclusively on political institutions and national leaders, Sory’s photographs recover the experiences of individuals. His archive makes visible the aspirations and creativity of people whose lives might otherwise remain outside conventional historical narratives.
That is why Je vais décoller continues to resonate nearly fifty years after its creation. The painted aircraft may suggest a departure, but the photograph also invites a different interpretation. Perhaps the journey has less to do with leaving a place than with imagining a different future within it.
Sory’s achievement was to give people the space to express that possibility. His camera recorded more than how Bobo-Dioulasso looked. It preserved how its people wanted to be remembered.
Ultimately, Sanlé Sory Photography is a testament to the relationship between art, identity, and historical memory. Through his portraits, Sory gave a generation the opportunity to define itself on its own terms. His archive continues to remind us that photography is not simply a means of recording the world as it exists. It can also become a powerful way for people to imagine, construct, and claim the world they want to inhabit.
