• All images courtesy Olivier Sultan/Musee des Arts Derniers
• Malick Sidibé, Toute la Famille en Moto, 1962

Malick Sidibé has run his own photography studio in the capital of Mali, Bamako, since 1958. He's still there, cleaning and fixing the cameras with his own hands, despite the fact that since the 1990s, he has also been a star at art fairs, exhibitions, and awards shows around the world. In 2007, he won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. At that time, curator Robert Storr wrote:

Like August Sander, the great German photographer, he has preserved the likenesses of countless individuals while in the process recording the face of the rapidly changing society they, as citizens, have collectively brought into being. ...

[Sidibé] is the undisputed master of his photographic generation. No artist anywhere is more deserving of the 2007 Biennale of Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and none more worthy of being the first African so honored.

This month, a new gallery in Seattle will make its mark with a solo exhibition by Sidibé—a huge coup straight out the gate. The show, at M.I.A. Gallery on Second Avenue near the Seattle Art Museum, will include 30 of Sidibé's photographs, ranging from small to very large. They'll date back to the 1960s, when Mali had just won its independence from France, and Sidibé would roam the infectiously excited nights, sometimes going to four or six parties in a single evening, snapping pictures of young people dancing with new abandon. In the 1970s, Sidibé focused more on elaborately staged portraits, calling his studio "like a place of make-believe." He'd create the images that people wanted to see of themselves, revealing the desires and pleasures of a whole culture in a moment in time.

"It's so personal for me," says Mariane Lenhardt, the French Somali-born owner of the M.I.A. Gallery. "I'm very attached to giving a fair image to Africa. There is a long tradition of guys who want to show we can have fun in Africa."

I'll write more about her and Sidibé in next week's paper. But put the opening on your calendar: Thursday, January 26, from 6 to 9 pm. A few more images are on the jump.

• Yokoro, 1970.

• Dansez le twist, 1965.

• The man himself: Malick Sidibé.

• Mariane, owner of the new M.I.A. Gallery.