Photo Stories
Is there a place for a mobile portrait studio on your street? Fatoumata Diabaté believes so. She tells Keith Wilson why she has spent the past ten years taking her studio all over the world
The idea of a photographer using a large-format view camera and mobile studio to randomly photograph strangers on the streets might seem anachronistic in this age of mobile phone imagery and TikTok. But for the Malian photographer Fatoumata Diabaté, her mobile photography studio project, Le Studio Photo de la Rue (The street photo studio) continues a tradition popularised in Africa by the street studio photographers of the 1950s and 60s, notably Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Oumar Ly, Mama Casset and Youssouf Sogodogo.
The project was conceived in 2013 soon after Fatoumata completed a residency at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. Although inspired by the spontaneity of street photography, she wanted to pay homage to these pioneers by adopting many of the techniques they deployed. ‘My parents were both immortalised in a portrait by Seydou Keïta, who was our neighbour when I was growing up in Mali,’ she says. ‘So, I created Le Studio Photo de la Rue as a tribute to the great masters of African studio photography and to keep this tradition alive.’
Another time and culture
In the past ten years, Fatoumata has taken her mobile studio beyond her home countries of Mali and France, photographing more than 2,000 people on streets as far apart as Colombia and China, Brazil and Ethiopia. Her first portraits were made while living in Senegal. The public response was reassuringly positive. ‘My first efforts exceeded my expectations. People who came to the studio were pleased and surprised to discover the technique of another time and culture.’
As with her parents’ experience with Seydou Keïta, many of Fatoumata’s early sitters remembered their own parents’ street studio portraits and took great delight at attempting to recreate the experience. ‘They get to feel both pride and fun at the same time,’ she says. ‘Everyone smiles or even bursts out laughing looking at his or her own parents from the 1950s and 1960s.’
Like Keita and his contemporaries, Fatoumata shoots in black & white. This approach might seem like a missed opportunity given the colourful attire of many of her sitters, but more important to her is the spontaneity of their reaction and her own response to the moment, which she describes as ‘a singular dialogue between the model and the photographer’. She continues: ‘I let the encounters guide me. I’m focusing on what appeals to me in their appearance. Beyond all, it is this social atmosphere, t
