Sanlé Sory (b. 1943) is a Burkinabé photographer best known for the exuberant black and white studio and nightlife photographs he made in Bobo-Dioulasso from the 1960s. He fell in love with photography when he first posed for his ID picture. After his three year apprenticeship,  he opened the Volta Photo studio in 1960 — the same year Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) was navigating independence — and there he built a visual practice that mixed formal studio portraiture with on-the-street reportage of the city’s music, dance halls and youth culture. 

Working in primarily black and white photography - Sory used colour techniques for specialised commissions. He commissioned his studio backgrounds with Ghanaian decorative painters and asked his subjects to bring props to the shoots. These pictures (or ‘souvenir photo’ as phrased by Okwui Enwezor) document a postcolonial moment of style, aspiration and social freedom in West Africa.  

Though his work was little known internationally for decades, Sory’s photographs have been the subject of major exhibitions; a notable institutional show was Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 with a coinciding Steidl catalog titled Volta Photo . His photographs, which draw frequent comparison to contemporaries like Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, are now included in museum collections and gallery programs worldwide.  

Sory’s most widely-circulated images were made decades earlier — his celebrated Volta Photo portraits and the “bals poussières/dust balls” documentation date primarily from the 1960s through the 1980s — and curatorial and publishing attention did not arrive until the 2000s. These later years of practice saw Sory turning more frequently to colour photography using 24x36 film and Olympus or Konica cameras.