Malick Sidibé

Malick Sidibé started off as a studio photographer in 1950s Mali, but Bamako on the cusp of liberation was no place for a talented youngster to stay indoors, and pretty soon he was prowling the streets, and the newly liberated Malian youth -in love with Western culture - were easy prey.

These playful yet intimate pictures from the 1960s and 1970s are so redolent of fresh-squeezed freedom you can almost hear the music: a couple sways, absorbed by each other's feet; an elegant yé-yé dancer poses; a group swimming during the Great Heat of 1976 offers itself up to a shark's eye view - although the main danger here is in the distrustful, smouldering eyes of the girls in the centre of the group. That's unusual: most subjects look delighted to be in the frame. They shimmy; they display hats with mile-long brims, in exuberant imitation of - what?

The picture is called 'Friends of the Spanish', but I never saw a Spaniard wear anything remotely like this. They even saunter off the street and into the studio: there's a gorgeous image of two little girls, alike in everything but expression, and one of a woman seductively stretched out like an African Olympia, except that Manet's courtesan certainly didn't shimmer with such layered patterns from floor to bedspread to matching dress and turban.

These are fantastic pictures, and those which jar do so because of the gap between their joyful co-option of Western dress and dance styles, presented for the viewer's admiration, and our uneasy knowledge that simple admiration, at the height of America's civil rights struggles, was the last thing a young African was liable to get.