2008 Infinity Award: Lifetime Achievement

Internationally renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibé opened his legendary and still-thriving Studio Malick in 1962 in Bamako, Mali, where he continues to live and work. Sidibé was Bamako's first photojournalist, capturing the energy of that city's youth at parties and social gatherings. Studio Malick became a central meeting place for this generation, and Sidibé's striking portraits reveal an exuberance for photography that matched the spirit emblematic of post-colonial West Africa in the late 1950s through the mid-1970s. His pioneering images from this period have come to represent a collective portrait of that time and place, and he has continued to photograph more recently for the French fashion magazines Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Double. Now widely collected and exhibited throughout the world, Sidibé won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2003 and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2007 Venice Biennale.