If you listened in art class back in high school, you probably remember Irving Penn, August Sander, and Richard Avedon. Three of the four most influential portrait photographers of the 20th century. The fourth? Seydou Keïta, of course. The Malian artist who documented Bamako’s society for decades. If you didn’t listen back then in high school, now’s your time to pay attention. Because until March 8th, the Brooklyn Museum is showing Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens, the most expansive retrospective of his work ever seen in North America.
One of the pictures you can discover here shows a young woman standing in an empty room with concrete floors and walls. She’s wearing a sleeveless, A-line dress that just reaches her knees, cinched at the waist with a wide belt. Her arms are bare, except for what looks like a wristwatch and a small shiny ring on her finger. Her shoes are big, with a wedge heel and a thick patterned platform. Underneath her perfectly shaped Afro, a pair of thin hoop earrings peek out, and in one corner of the room, you can see a rope adorned with long, dangling film negatives, ready to be developed.
Who is the woman? We don’t know. What we do know is that she’s one of the many people Keïta photographed between the late 1940s and early 1960s. A picture that shows exactly what he created over all those years: a mirror of how Mali evolved during a time of profound political and social transformation. A chronicle of emerging liberation struggles. Growing expressions of modernism in a time when Bamako served as the capital of French Sudan and a chronicle of a new independence in 1960. It’s a record of the people’s emotional landscapes, changing choices of backdrops, accessories, and hairstyles: their evolving styles from traditional finery to modern attire. Men who started wearing Western suits from the 1950s proudly posing with wristwatches, telephones, and even motorcycles. Women showing their jewellery, their elegance.
Keïta always collaborated with his subjects, with friends, family, neighbours and clients, taking his time in his Bamako-based studio to find the perfect pose, the perfect light. Dedicated to staging the person in front of his lens in the most beautiful, fitting way. As you can see, he focused on composition, but even more so, he focused on his subject’s personality, individuality and social identity, all in one frame. His images are unadulterated, real, and honest. Sharp and precise. A visual archive of the past: elegant, poetic, bold and sensitive, all at the same time.
Unfortunately, the photographer never wrote down the identities of the people he captured, so we can only imagine what their stories were. Nevertheless, the Brooklyn Museum, under the thoughtful guidance of guest curator Catherine E. McKinley, reached out to the artist’s family and therefore managed to create a deeply personal and comprehensive retrospective that traces Keïta’s artistic journey and his impact on portrait photography. Showcased are more than 280 works, including well-known prints and never-before-seen portraits. Cameras, personal artifacts, textiles, fashion and rare insights from those closest to him. Works that once circulated in West Africa nearly eighty years ago but only reached a Western audience in the early 1990s.
What started with a simple Kodak Brownie camera—a gift from his uncle when Keïta was a teenager, with a film that held just eight shots—made him one of the great masters of 20th-century documentary and portrait photography. An important peer of other masters like Irving, Sander and Avedon. A celebrated artist. A legend. A name you should definitely remember if you were paying attention in high school. If not, that’s of course also fine. But let me tell you, just standing in front of Keïta’s portraits, you remember what art can do, how it can see us long before we learn to see ourselves. How it can preserve. Make the time stand still. Or how it can make time be seen. Whatever we want.
