Jean DEPARA (1928–1997) - Lot 124

Jean DEPARA (1928–1997) "At the Club, the Vatican" (Nightlife in Kinshasa, circa 1970), photograph. 30 x 30 cm Note: Jean Depara took up photography in 1951, the year of his marriage in Matadi, with the purchase of a modest 6x6 Adox camera. He settled in Leopoldville that same year and initially worked various jobs—as a bicycle and camera repairman and a scrap metal dealer—before opening his own studio, Jean Whisky Depara, at 54 Kato Street. The capital he photographed was then in full swing: rumba, maringa, and tango brought together a cosmopolitan population, and young people organized themselves into rival clubs, each with its own style, bar, and band. By day, Depara frequented the nganda and the La Funa sports complex, where he photographed bodybuilders; by night, with his flash slung over his shoulder, he scoured the trendy dance halls, from the Afro Mogenbo to the Kongo Bar. Spotted as early as 1954 by Franco, the maestro of rumba, he became the musician’s official photographer at the age of twenty-six and remained so until the musician’s death in 1989. He abandoned the studio in 1956 in favor of the streets and the nightlife, then worked from 1975 to 1989 as a photographer attached to Parliament. He passed away in Kinshasa in 1997, leaving behind more than five thousand photographs that capture, without prejudice or taboo, the carefree spirit of a capital city that the novelist Achille Ngoye nicknamed “Kin-la-joie, Kin-la-Folie.” His work invites comparison with that of Malick Sidibé (1935–2016), his younger Malian counterpart: in both Bamako and Leopoldville, the same impulse to leave the studio to follow young people to their dances and clubs, and to draw from the African nightlife of the 1950s through the 1970s an intimate chronicle of independence and its fashions. Both were introduced to Western audiences in the 1990s through the movement to rediscover African photography spearheaded by *Revue Noire*, the *Rencontres de Bamako*, and the Pigozzi Collection. Represented by Revue Noire, by agreement with the Estate of Depara, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Paris, Geneva, Kinshasa, and Bamako, as well as major group shows: *L’Afrique par elle-même* (Maison européenne de la photographie, 1998, an international tour running through 2001, including Tervuren), where it was displayed alongside Sidibé’s work; *African Art Now* (Pigozzi Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005); *100% Africa* (Guggenheim Bilbao, 2006–2007), and *Beauté Congo, 1926–2005* (Fondation Cartier, Paris, 2015).