A photographer from Matam, in the Senegal River valley, born in 1947, Demba Sarr spent his life capturing his hometown. He started out in 1966 as an itinerant photographer, then took over Studio Baye in 1969. In color, on Kodachrome, he captured a free and inventive youth, between boubous and bell-bottoms, record players and dance parties. His photographs are not just portraits but true fragments of memory, capturing the energy, aspirations and aesthetic codes of a generation. His images are a rare record of the social and cultural life of a town in northern Senegal from the 1960s to the 1980s, revealing all the energy of a town opening up to the world in the aftermath of independence. Long forgotten, his archives have now been rescued by Lost Memory Archive Senegal, an initiative founded by Cheikh Tidiane Mbaye and Adelina Sasnauskaite to restore the work of local Senegalese photographers.
