120 - Kouyaté Adama Studios d'Afrique. Beautiful book published by Gang Editions, Ivry sur Seine, France, in 2010. Adama Kouyaté is a Malian photographer born in 1928 in Bougouni, in the Sikasso region. Like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita, Adama Kouyaté belongs to the generation of Malian photographers who captured the mood of Malian society just after independence. Brand new, in original plastic film. Shebeen blues

Kouyaté Adama Studios d'Afrique. Beautiful book published by Gang Editions, Ivry sur Seine, France, in 2010. Adama Kouyaté is a Malian photographer born in 1928 in Bougouni, in the Sikasso region. Like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita, Adama Kouyaté belongs to the generation of Malian photographers who captured the mood of Malian society just after independence. Brand new, in original plastic film. Shebeen blues Under Apartheid, blacks were forbidden to meet or drink alcohol. In the townships of the time, shacks served as underground bars, the shebeen. These shebeens were the only places where freedom, in backyards or confined within walls, could find an outlet. They were a meeting place for the disenfranchised, the working class, ordinary alcoholics and subversive opponents of the regime. The shebeen were crucibles, where the system was forgotten as much as the weapons of its overthrow were forged... 15 years after the end of apartheid, what remains of the shebeen? This reflection is the genesis of the work. Ananias Léki Dago, photographer, went into the shebeens today. He took the time to observe, to sit back and soak up the atmosphere, to transcribe his perception of reality as accurately as possible. Taken with a Leica, Ananias Léki Dago's shots are nourished by lines; bottles, billiard cues, fragments of bodies cut out, hands linger; shadows deepen, stand out. Mongane writer Wally Serote sets his short story in a shebeen. One evening, a former resistance fighter against the Apartheid regime exchanges disillusioned confidences with a woman, a loner like himself. In bits and pieces, he recalls the past. The shebeen, then as now, is a world in itself; described as a living organism where body heat mingles with the fumes of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Between Serote's disenchanted short story and the fragments of silhouettes in Ananias' photos, the reader forms an image of the shebeen. Far from a romantic vision, it appears as a closed, timeless place; almost ordinary, but difficult to access and escape from.