(1931-1997) Kita
Félix Diallo was born (June 12, 1931) and educated at the Catholic Mission in Kita, where, at an early age, he was introduced to photography. After the death of his father in 1947, he stopped his studies and began working as a tailor. In 1951, at the age of twenty, he left Kita for the Dar-es-Salam neighborhood of Bamako, where in 1952 he found employment with Pierre Garnier at Photo-Hall Soudanais, replacing Tiékoura Samaké who worked as a printer in the darkroom. While at Photo-Hall Soudanais, Diallo obtained his first camera, a "Scoutbox," and eventually he learned to use it by listening to the advice Garnier provided his clients. Diallo stopped working at Photo-Hall Soudanais in 1954, after Garnier left Bamako for Dakar. The following year, Diallo returned to Kita and opened a studio in the market on the west side of town, becoming Kita's first professional photographer. In addition to studio work, he operated itinerantly with his (13 x 18 cm) box camera, taking identification photos, portraits, and class pictures at local schools, neighboring rural markets, and nearby towns. Within two years, in 1957, Diallo founded a second studio Photo Bar in the Ségubuguni neighborhood of Kita. His photographic activities further increased after independence, in 1960, when he was asked to photograph regional accidents for the national police. During this period, around 1963, he renamed his studio Photo Lux, and acquired a soviet-fabricated Krokus enlarger and began working with a more manageable and higher quality (6 x 6 cm) medium-format camera in 1970 (Nimis 2003).
Like many of his colleagues, by 1977, under the difficult economy of Moussa Traoré, business became increasingly challenging for Diallo, who often found it impossible to obtain photographic supplies, such as film. The introduction of color technology as well as the increase in amateur and "street" photographers in the 1980s presented him, and many of his colleagues, with additional challenges. However, he persevered until his retirement in 1988 (since then he turned to work in his orchard and totally abandoned his studio). Two years later, on September 5, 1997, Diallo passed away in his hometown (Nimis 2003).
Unfortunately, the majority of Diallo's photographic archives have been destroyed. However, almost nine-hundred negatives were in his possession when Érika Nimis interviewed the photographer in 1996 and 1997. In 2003, she published a small collection of those images in booklet entitled Félix Diallo: Photographe de Kita. With the partnership of Diallo's family, in 2017, she joined the Archive of Malian Photography (amp.matrix.msu.edu) to digitize, preserve, and render accessible online Diallo's entire photographic collection, which is housed at the Municipal Archives in Toulouse.
The work of Félix Diallo has been exhibited in Bamako (1998), Montreuil, France (2000), Toulouse (2002) and Kita (Nimis 2018).
