‘We Own the Night’

Sutigi – À nous la nuit, or ‘we own the night’, is a confident declaration of ownership and the title of Malian artist Fatoumata Diabaté’s photographic series documenting a small population of African youth living in great metropolises. Born in Bamako in 1980, Diabaté initially began this series in 2004 as a research project on clothing and fashion by photographing the youth of Mali and Senegal. The series was completed in 2013 with images from South Africa and the Republic of the Congo. Diabaté captures the nightlife habits of young men and women, some of whom are the photographer’s own friends and neighbours. With the support of Diabaté’s photographs, I argue that Sutigi is in dialogue with the work of her predecessor, Malick Sidibé (1936-2016). Sidibé worked and identified as a studio photographer before his photographs were re-appropriated by Western institutions as ‘art’, whereas Diabaté works in the expanding arena of ‘art photography’ in Mali. Although superficial links have been made between the two photographers by displaying them together in group exhibitions, this chapter investigates their formal similarities and contextual differences. I first discuss local and international changes that allowed for Malian women such as Diabaté to enter the field of photography. Next, I explore three important themes found in Sutigi, which include youth, the night, and self-fashioning. Finally, I contextualise and historicise Diabaté’s series by comparing it to the ‘reportage’ photographs of Bamako’s youth culture captured by Sidibé in the 1960s and 1970s.