iThe Photographers' GallerySoho
Sanlé Sory: Colour Years
Sanlé Sory's rarely seen colour photographs shown together for the first time, capturing youth culture and fashion in Burkina Faso.
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In 2011 the writer Florent Mazzoleni visited Sanlé Sory in Bobo-Dioulasso and found him burning old negatives, convinced nobody cared about them. Mazzoleni spent the night looking at photos by flashlight. This show comes out of the archive that night started: colour prints restored from Sory's negatives, shown in the UK for the first time.
Sory, famous for black-and-white portraits from the 1960s and 70s, turned to colour in the mid-1980s, and the subjects here are families, couples and friends at his Volta Photo studio, ID pictures, and traders at the local market. In black and white you only get the cut of a shirt. Here you see the patterns the sitters picked for the day.
The Reviews Hub gave it 80% and called it "a cavalcade of striking, stylish individuals in a riotous fusion of colour and print". Tickets are £14 at the door or £12 online, each including a £2 donation, and one ticket covers every show that day. It's open until 20:00 on Thursdays and Fridays.
Look for
The Volta Jazz record covers
Sory's portraits of the bands that flourished after Burkina Faso's independence, as they appeared on the records' sleeves.
The man on the motorbike
A sitter poses on a motorbike in the studio, in a session where the pose was his choice, not Sory's.
The man on the phone
A man holds a telephone to his ear, one of the studio props customers could borrow along with radios and record players.
The market portraits
Traders and shopkeepers photographed at the local market, away from the studio's painted backdrops.
The independence wax prints
Look for two women posing in dresses cut from the wax-print fabric made to mark fifty years of Burkina Faso's independence.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Locals Who've Seen It All
Free in the same building
Plan a visit to The Photographers' GalleryAlso at The Photographers' Gallery
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Image credits
9
- Sanlé Sory: Colour Years© Sanlé Sory, 2026. Courtesy of Tezeta.
- The RA CollectionCourtesy of Royal Academy of Arts
- Painting the French RivieraCourtesy of Royal Academy of Arts
- Nicole EisenmanCourtesy of Royal Academy of Arts
- The Photographers' GalleryThe wub / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Royal Academy of ArtsYair Haklai / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Portrait GalleryIstvánka / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National GalleryCarlos Delgado / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- British MuseumHam / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0