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I started to photograph in 1945 in BAMAKO. I am self taught; I had a 6x9 camera that one of my uncles had brought me back from Senegal. He had given to me also money to buy film. It all started like that. Honestly, it's a craft that I practiced the better that I could : I was really in love with photography.
At the beginning I photographed my family. Some attitudes worked, some others not. I really had a bad start : people moved and I probably trembled myself. When printing, they all looked like skeletons. You see : I was really undertrained. I was asking my client the money for the print that I was doing at Pierre Garnier's or at Mountaga's lab. He taught me how to print. If the print didn't come out well, I was into problems; clients were very angry, but they were the ones that moved!
In 1948 Mountaga admitted that I was qualified enough to lend me over his darkroom. I was doing all the processing, but in black and white only. Colour was around of course, but you had to send the films to France and anyway, I didn't like it. For me it was the black and white that was the right thing. In those days, there were 4 photographers in BAMAKO : Issouf, Boundyana, Mountaga and myself. Malik Sidibe came afterwards. We were all doing portraits, but people used to say that my "cards" were the best. I had a stamp that I put on all my prints.
In 1949, I bought a view camera and started with 5x7 negatives. I was doing contact prints, that's why I prefered 5x7. I had pinned on the walls of the studio various samples of my work : men or women in bust, alone or by two, or even groups up to 6 people, families and so on. The clients were telling me : we want to be photographed like this, you see? And I was doing it. But sometimes I was changing for a position that looked better. I was the one to decide in the last and I was never mistaking. It took only a few minutes, I shot one negative, never more. Many people were coming, buy on Saturdays, it was crowded: people were queueing: all sorts: shopkeepers, office clerks; even the president of the Republic came. I was doing the printing overnight and the spotting in the morning just before the clients would come and pick up their portrait.
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