Seydou Keïta built furniture alongside his carpenter father in Bamako, Mali, until he opened a photography studio there in 1948. The professions had more in common than might first appear, because he continued in his portraits to construct beautiful compositions that would please his clients.
Almost half a century later, in a published interview, he said, “What really made a difference was that I always knew how to find the right position, and I was never wrong.” As he summed it up: “I was capable of making someone look really good.”
His boast is amply substantiated in “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,” a gorgeous retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum that opens a window onto the life of the artist, who died in 2001, and his fellow citizens of Bamako, capital of the colony that was known as French Sudan before it gained independence and was renamed Mali.
To make his portraits, Keïta determined the best angle and lighting. He also supplied props — automobiles, radios, textiles, fountain pens and European suits and ties — to buttress the aspirations of his sitters, most of whom hailed from the African elite but crossed over class lines. As his reputation grew, by the early 1950s customers queued up outside his compound all day long, coming from as far away as Benin, Mauritania and Ivory Coast.
A signature of Keïta’s photography is his use of patterned handwoven textiles as backdrops in his portraits, a device that has inspired later artists, notably Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley. In the exhibition, textiles adorn the walls and hang from the ceiling, in colorful contrast to the black-and-white photos. Sometimes, women pose like odalisques on fabric-covered beds — in one case, with five different cloths layered beneath the sitter.
Like handwoven textiles, gold is a prized product of Mali, and many of the female subjects are adorned with intricate gold jewelry. The excellent catalog explores these material aspects of Keïta’s work. And the exhibition ends with a room devoted to vividly patterned textiles, finely wrought gold ornaments and — most spectacularly — manikins clothed in traditional dress.
Keïta landed on his career when, at about age 12, he received a box camera that his uncle brought back from Senegal. Encouraged by the son of an expatriate Frenchman who processed film in Bamako for photographers throughout West Africa, Keïta taught himself to take pictures. He apprenticed with Mountaga Dembélé, considered the first Malian photographer, eventually taking over his studio.
As the oldest son, he was responsible for more than 100 family members, and he would also support four wives and 21 children of his own. Fortunately, his studio practice earned him a good living until, in 1963, he was called into government service and had to close it down. After he retired as an official photographer in 1977, he found that his studio had been ransacked in his absence. “I was completely wiped out, and I couldn’t take pictures anymore,” he said. Instead, he worked as an auto mechanic.
Mali won independence from France in 1960. During the 25 years that Keïta ran his studio, it was a society in transition. Keïta is often compared to August Sander, the great German photographer who documented his countrymen between the world wars. But while Sander’s subjects were conforming (with varying degrees of success) to roles that had been prescribed by long custom, Keïta was photographing men and women who were breaking free of colonial domination yet were still tethered to their cultural history and lacking any clear indication of where they were headed.
The show was organized by a guest curator, Catherine E. McKinley, who visited Bamako to interview Keïta’s relatives and neighbors, and secured loans of previously unpublished negatives and some personal possessions, including his cameras. It features almost 300 photographs. Studying them, you discern how the residents of Bamako — and a steady flow of sitters from Senegal, who could travel there on the Dakar-Niger Railway, which was completed in 1923 around the time of Keïta’s birth — synthesized their African heritage with visions of France, known only from magazines and hearsay.
Keïta’s clients would receive small vintage prints, some of them hand-colored, which are on display in the exhibition. (They were required to buy three prints. They paid a higher price if the photos were taken indoors with artificial illumination supplied by three 500-watt lamps, an extravagance in the 1950s, when electricity outside government buildings was a rarity in Bamako.) But what arrests the eye are the large prints that Keïta made in the 1990s, after his discovery in the West through a serendipitous sequence of events.
In 1991, several of Keïta’s pictures, attributed to an “unknown photographer” in Bamako, were included in a group show of African artists held in New York by the Center for African Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. These photographs, as well as those by other unnamed practitioners, aroused the interest of critics and collectors, including Jean Pigozzi, heir to the Simca automobile fortune, who enlisted his curator, André Magnin, to travel to Mali. There, Magnin identified Keïta (and the other leading Bamako photographer, Malick Sidibé, who was about a decade younger than Keïta), and acquired many of Keïta’s negatives. (Pigozzi lent 110 prints to this exhibition.)
In 1997, a solo show at Gagosian Gallery in New York and the publication of the first monograph of his work established Keïta’s reputation. Thanks to this success, he was able to make large, in some instances nearly life-size, prints of his subjects.
His entry into the global art market transformed the nature of the work. For his sitters, a portrait by Keïta was a status symbol, just like the wristwatch or sewing machine that some clients brought to a sitting. A photograph was also something to send to faraway relatives or exchange with friends, and it could be circulated in the quest for a marital partner.
On a deeper level, presenting oneself to Keïta’s lens was a way of grappling with personal identity. Most of his sitters are relatively youthful. In the most affecting portraits, they appear to be still uncertain of who they are or will be: a man in a white suit wearing large black eyeglasses, with a fountain pen in his pocket and a plastic flower in his hand; a wistful young woman on the cusp of maturity, standing in a white dress in front of a lace drapery and gazing off into the distance; an ultra-fashionable woman in a large gauzy hat and a chic dress that could be a Parisian import but, judging from the striped fabric, was probably tailored in Bamako.
Enlarged, framed and hung in a museum, these images are uprooted from their functional context, the sort of transformation that also occurs when African ritual masks and religious objects are displayed on white gallery walls.
What the sitters might have thought of this metamorphosis is unknown. The photographer, however, was thrilled. “You can’t imagine what it was like for me the first time I saw prints of my negatives printed large-scale, no spots, clean and perfect,” he told the photography curator Michelle Lamunière in an interview in 2000, a year before his death. “I knew then that my work was really, really good. The people in my photos looked so alive, almost as if they were standing right in front of me, in the flesh.”
Visitors to this exhibition will understand how he felt.
Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens
Through March 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
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