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Volta Colour

Volta Colour

by Sanlé Sory

£45.00 GBP
£45.00 GBP
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Pre-order. Expected October 2026.

GOST Books are pleased to share the first book published in collaboration with the Photographers’ Gallery, written and edited by Taous Dahmani, one of the gallery’s curators.

Volta Colour explores the shift from black and white to colour photography through the work of one of West Africa's most prolific photographers. Sanlé Sory was born in 1943 and opened his photo studio in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960. Over many years, he took more than a million pictures showing how his community changed. Sory welcomed change. When asked why he switched to colour in the 1980s, he said: "When you are in a place where everybody dances, you have to try to dance like everybody else!" 

By the late 1980s, colour had become the heart of his work. In Sory's studio, his clients chose their clothes, hairstyles and poses with care. These photographs are about more than fashion. They show pride, confidence and hope. They capture people building new lives in a changing country.  

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The book is published to coincide with The Photographers Gallery exhibition Sanlé Sory: Colour Years which opens on October 14 2026 and runs to 21 February 2027.

More about this book

Volta Colour shows that the move to colour was about much more than photography. From the years of President Thomas Sankara in the 1980s, through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Sory's photographs show people imagining the future on their own terms. They tell the story of West Africa through the eyes of West Africans.  

The book is published to coincide with The Photographers Gallery exhibition Sanlé Sory: Colour Years which opens on October 14 2026 and runs to 21 February 2027. This exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery is the first time Sanlé Sory’s colour work has been shown in an exhibition in the UK; he is well known for his black and white work, but little known for his colour work which will take centre stage in the exhibition and the accompanying book.

 “This exhibition and this book offers a rare opportunity to discover a lesser-known chapter of work by Sanlé Sory, one of West Africa’s most celebrated photographers. His vibrant colour photographs from the mid-1980s through to the 2010s document a rapidly changing time in Burkina Faso.” —  Taous Dahmani

A series of associated events will be announced for Autumn in London at the end of the summer.

Published October 2026
178 x 250 mm
160 pages, 99 images
Hardback clothbound
ISBN 978-1-80598-060-5

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From the author

  • Sanlé Sory (b. 1943) is a Burkinabé photographer best known for the exuberant black and white studio and nightlife photographs he made in Bobo-Dioulasso from the 1960s. He fell in love with photography when he first posed for his ID picture. After his three year apprenticeship, he opened the Volta Photo studio in 1960 — the same year Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) was navigating independence — and there he built a visual practice that mixed formal studio portraiture with on-the-street reportage of the city’s music, dance halls and youth culture.

    Working in primarily black and white photography - Sory used colour techniques for specialised commissions. He commissioned his studio backgrounds with Ghanaian decorative painters and asked his subjects to bring props to the shoots. These pictures (or ‘souvenir photo’ as phrased by Okwui Enwezor) document a postcolonial moment of style, aspiration and social freedom in West Africa. Though his work was little known internationally for decades, Sory’s photographs have been the subject of major exhibitions; a notable institutional show was Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 with a coinciding Steidl catalog titled Volta Photo . His photographs, which draw frequent comparison to contemporaries like Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, are now included in museum collections and gallery programs worldwide. Sory’s most widely-circulated images were made decades earlier — his celebrated Volta Photo portraits and the “bals poussières/dust balls” documentation date primarily from the 1960s through the 1980s — and curatorial and publishing attention did not arrive until the 2000s. These later years of practice saw Sory turning more frequently to colour photography using 24x36 film and Olympus or Konica cameras.

  • 'When you are in a place where everybody dances, you have to try to dance like everybody else!'

    - Sanlé Sory