Colour Years by Sanlé Sory at The Photographers' Gallery

Colour Years brings together Sanlé Sory’s lesser-known colour portraits at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, tracing social change in Burkina Faso through fashion, music, attitudes, and everyday life.

Overview

Best known for his black-and-white studio and nightlife photographs, Sanlé Sory began working in colour at his Volta Photo studio in Bobo-Dioulasso in the mid-1980s. Colour Years brings together these lesser-known photographs, meticulously restored from negatives preserved in his archive. Spanning studio portraits of families, couples, and friends, as well as identity photographs, traders, and shopkeepers, the exhibition traces a society in transition across decades of political change and global exchange. Fashion, music, gestures, and attitudes become markers of individual expression and a community embracing new possibilities. The exhibition also includes Volta Jazz record covers featuring Sory’s portraits of bands that flourished following Burkina Faso’s independence.

About the Artist

Sanlé Sory (b. 1943) is a Burkinabé photographer known for his portraits of life in Bobo-Dioulasso. He opened his Volta Photo studio in 1960, the year of Upper Volta’s independence, combining studio portraiture with photographs of the city’s music, dance halls, and youth culture. His work documents decades of social change, self-expression, and everyday life in Burkina Faso, and is now held in museum collections internationally.