My Nursery class and I explored the work of the late photographer Malick Sidibé.

Malick Sidibé (1935 – 2016) was a Malian photographer, well known for his iconic black and white images celebrating life, youth and people. His work gave us so much to talk about and explore and was a great provocation for the children’s own creative work.

We spent time looking at a bunch of old cameras that had been in our role play area for a while (found on one of my charity shop trips of course!). Children were facinated by them, eager to know how they worked and what the buttons were for and how they were different from the ipad and ipod cameras that they were familiar with.

We talked about what a photographer does and talked about the children’s experiences of taking photos and cameras. We then looked at some of Sidibé’s work.

The children talked together about a range of photos; what they could see, what the photos made them think of, how the photos made them feel.

We spent time talking about the patterns the could see in the photos after noticing that all the photos were black and white. This was a starting point for children exploring black and white with paint and using black felt tips to explore line and pattern.

During outdoor play, children looked for what they found interesting outside – pattens and objects. They used ipods to taked their own pictures of what they found and talked about what they found interesting or what they noticed.

To learn more about Malcik Sidibé, watch Malick Sidibé: The eye of Bamako.

Read Interview with Malick Sidibé on Lensculture.com here