Omar Victor Diop

Presentation

Omar Victor Diop, born in Dakar in 1980, is a Senegalese portrait photographer and a leading exponent of contemporary African photography. A graduate of the École supérieure de commerce in Paris, Omar Victor Diop first worked in communications for British American Tobacco Afrique. In 2011, he left this position to devote himself to photography. Revealed at the Rencontres africaines de la photographie in Bamako in 2011 with his series “Le futur du beau”, he developed the series “Le studio des vanités”, inspired by portrait painters such as Malick Sidibé, Mama Casset or Seydou Keïta, to portray young urban, creative and dynamic Africans. The 2014 “Diaspora” series, exhibited on the Paris Photo stand of Galerie Magnin-A, marks the start of a body of work on the history of black people, African or otherwise, in Africa and the World. In this series, he stages himself in highly controlled self-portraits, re-enacting portraits of black men outside Africa from the 15th to the 19th century. All eighteen photographs in this series were acquired by the Fondation Louis-Vuitton and presented at the “Art Afrique le Nouvel Atelier” exhibition in 2017. In 2016, Omar Victor Diop takes photographs of eighteen African employees of Pernod Ricard to illustrate the company's annual report. The series was exhibited at Paris Photo that same year. That same year, he began the “Liberty (Universal Chronology of Black Protest)” series. He presents this work as “a new attempt to proceed with a reinvented narration of the history of the black people, and hence, of the history of humanity and that of the notion of Liberty.” Diop is represented exclusively by Galerie Magnin-A, Paris.