The Burkinabè photographer and Ayzoh! member has donated a body of work to the African Culture Fund. The photographs now become part of a collection rooted in the continent whose histories Warren has documented for decades.**
In a room at the Centre Photographique de Ouagadougou, Warren Sare stands behind a young photographer and helps him hold the camera. His hands guide the boy’s hands. Along the wall, the others wait, watch, and study the gesture. Before anyone presses the shutter, there is the question that begins every photograph: where do you stand, and what do you choose to include?
The images accompanying this news were made while Warren, Ayzoh!, and a group of young people from the streets of Ouagadougou were working together on Je Suis la Rue. They show Warren as we have come to know him: photographing, certainly, but also teaching, listening, correcting a movement without taking control of it.
The African Culture Fund recently announced that Warren Boureima Sare had donated a body of his photographic work to its collection. In its statement, ACF–Fonds Maaya recognized his contribution to documentary photography, particularly his long-term work on former Senegalese Tirailleurs, and welcomed him among the artists supporting the Fund through the donation of their work.
For Ayzoh!, the importance of this decision lies partly in its direction. These photographs are entering an African cultural collection, where they can remain connected to the histories, places, and people from which Warren’s work has grown. The donation is an act of cultural responsibility: the work becomes part of a wider memory rather than remaining solely in the possession of its author.
Warren has spent much of his career photographing people whose lives risk being reduced to incomplete accounts. His series *Anciens Combattants*, devoted to West African veterans of colonial wars, approaches history through individual faces, domestic spaces, uniforms, gestures, and the marks left by time. The images do not turn the veterans into symbols. They allow each person to retain his own presence.
The same attention shapes Warren’s work at the Centre Photographique de Ouagadougou. The CPO was initiated and led by him as a working and educational space where young people, including children living on the streets, could encounter photography as a practical language. Ayzoh! has supported its development through equipment, editorial work, training, and long-term collaboration.
Learning to choose the frame
Je Suis la Rue emerged from this relationship. Cameras were placed in the hands of young participants, who began photographing Ouagadougou from their own position within the city. The project did not ask them to illustrate an existing narrative about street childhood. It gave them time, tools, and editorial space to construct their own.
In the photographs from those days, learning happens through proximity. Warren watches while a boy lifts a camera to his eye. Two participants compare images on compact cameras. Someone experiments with a self-portrait. A group tries to coordinate a jump beneath a darkening sky.
These are modest actions, but they change the usual distribution of roles. The young people are no longer waiting to be photographed or described by someone arriving from elsewhere. They decide where to point the camera, when to release the shutter, and what part of their city deserves to enter the frame.
The resulting publication records the development of the CPO, the workshops, and the first photographic journey created with the participants. It also preserves the uncertainty and pleasure of the process: the awkward first attempts, the concentration, the discoveries made while reviewing an image together.
A work that continues
Warren’s donation to the African Culture Fund does not separate his established photographic work from his commitment to younger generations. The two belong to the same practice.
He has documented histories that were in danger of being neglected. He has also helped create a place where new photographers can begin producing their own records. In one case, photography protects memory. In the other, it creates the conditions for someone else to participate in that memory.
We are proud that Warren is part of Ayzoh!, and proud to have worked beside him in Ouagadougou. His donation confirms something visible throughout his career: photographs carry their greatest public value when they are entrusted to relationships, institutions, and communities capable of carrying their meaning forward.
About the African Culture Fund
Founded in 2018 and based in Bamako, the African Culture Fund is a pan-African organization created by artists and cultural professionals. It finances cultural and creative projects, supports the professional development of artists and organizations, and works to strengthen cultural production across the continent through more equitable access to resources | visit the African Culture Fund.
About Warren Sare
Born in Boulgou, Burkina Faso, in 1965, Warren Boureima Sare began photographing at the age of thirteen. His documentary practice includes extensive work on the former Senegalese Tirailleurs and other chapters of West African social history. He initiated and leads the Centre Photographique de Ouagadougou and is a member of Ayzoh!, where his work as a photographer is inseparable from teaching and collaboration | read more about Warren Sare and the CPO. Je Suis la Rue
Developed by the Centre Photographique de Ouagadougou and Ayzoh! with young participants from the streets of Ouagadougou, Je Suis la Rue brings together their photographs and the story of the workshops in which they were produced | discover the project | explore the book.
