Senegalese, b. 1956; lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. Boubacar Touré Mandémory is an indefatigable chaser of images, an urban forager incessantly on the hunt for fleeting glimpses of everyday life. His works form a lexicon of stolen moments as intimate as they are strange; his approach is that of a poet rather than an ethnographer. Off-kilter angles evoke the warped opticality of dream life, often underscored by a darkened palette that lends the scenes a distinct sense of liminality. In the series Villes Capitales d’Afrique (Capitals of Africa) (c. 2000–05), Mandémory presents images of his childhood, the collection of streets and neighborhoods locked in his mind’s eye. Mandémory self-consciously positions his practice in opposition to documentary photography, in which he discerns the specters of colonial ethnography and its oppressive fictions.
