Seydou Keïta Captured a Nation on the Cusp of Independence
He could have hidden the soil from view. But there it is, honest, without adornment or apology. Spilling across the bottom of the frame, unconcealed by any carpet or contrivance, soil forms the literal foundation of so many photographs by the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta. In one such picture—of two forward-leaning women in long, sumptuous dresses—the prosaic roughness of dirt seems, perhaps, firmly at odds with how splendidly ornamented the sitters are; it is an element of sheer bathos when read against their beautifully patterned garments (even in black-and-white the designs seem to vibrate), their lustrous jewelry and skin, their nonchalant elegance, so present in their postures and hands and eyes. But the soil has a way of making the poetics of Keïta’s pictures whole: just like the people who sat before his camera, the soil is ineluctably of a particular place and a climate and a land. Together with the subjects in the picture, the soil speaks of Mali’s flesh and marrow.
Born in Bamako sometime between 1921 and 1923, Keïta began taking pictures in 1935, when his uncle gifted him a Kodak Brownie flash camera. After cultivating his gaze for more than a decade—while training alongside the Bamakois photographer Mountaga Dembélé—he opened his own studio in 1948. Fifteen prolific years of studio photography ended in 1963, after Keïta was hired as Mali’s state photographer, forcing him to close the studio. (Keïta retired in 1977, and died in 2001.) But the images from his studio—their panache and sensuality, the rich density of their optical terrains—have made Keïta a lodestar of West Africa’s twentieth-century photography. At the Brooklyn Museum, a retrospective of his work, “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,” is currently on view.
Many of Keïta’s sitters were part of Mali’s middle class: civil servants and soldiers, teachers and tradespeople. Some were local to Bamako, and others travelled long distances just to get their portrait taken by the man who had emerged as the region’s authority in portraiture. All came adorned and unrepentant in their right to adornment. Keïta and his studio fostered the embellishment of style and persona, the pleasure and play of fashioning a look and of desiring to be looked at.
Clients were drawn to Keïta for his distinct capacity to weave together blazing technical and aesthetic precision with a soft eye for the interiority of his subjects. He was known for taking only one shot per person or group; the shutter would click, and there would be no room for waste. He almost exclusively used large-format cameras, always with a shallow depth of field, yielding a fineness of detail that magnifies the presence of his subjects.
So, too, did this orientation to detail deepen those less tangible matters simmering behind the portrait subjects’ eyes and in their aura. Take, for example, one of Keïta’s best-known photographs, which pictures a suited young man in glasses holding up a plastic flower. Coiled around the bottom of the stem, his long fingers—like those we might find in a Mannerist painting—offer an endearing combination of awkwardness and beauty. The sharpness of the image is indelible: the punching contrast between the man’s crisp white suit and a black pen tucked in his coat pocket or the blackness of his skin; the robust detail of each flower petal. But there is also a subtlety in the man himself: his gaze is murky, uncertain, at once trained toward the camera and retreating underneath the thick rim of his glasses, eyes rippling inward.
Many of Keïta’s images are imbued not only with an air of psychological ambiguity but also with a certain cultural ambiguity. The momentum of his career was swept up in the whirl of Mali’s rapidly evolving political circumstances: the country, formerly known as French Sudan, gained its independence and became Mali in 1960. Images from Keïta’s studio attest to the polymorphic consciousness of a colony hurtling toward independence, caught in a kind of fugue between tradition and novelty, between the resurgence of African taste and the appropriation of European sensibilities, between the grandeur of pan-Africanist aspirations and the specificity of the local. All these tensions—and the attendant endeavor to resolve them into a national identity—vie at the surfaces of Keïta’s pictures: they are exercises in individual style and self-fashioning which mirrored the fashioning of a nation.
Attire—particularly textiles—helped set the key of this tune. Keïta kept a vast repository of cloths and fabrics in his studio, using these as backdrops (in contrast to the painted backdrops of European and North American studio portraiture). His sitters often draped themselves in a variety of West African textiles—paying homage to the centrality of the textile in African sartorialism—as well as cloths from Europe and the Islamic world. The ensuing density of pattern pressing against pattern animates a play of geometries and rhythms that links Keïta’s visual schemas to those of European abstraction. Naturally, this latter conceit also belies the African influence that made European modernism possible.
We see this, for example, in an untitled portrait sometimes called “Two Ladies of Bamako.” Here, Keïta captures a pair of women—holding each other at the shoulders and the hands—dressed in traditional Malian robe-like garments called boubou. Behind them is a printed-fabric backdrop, and at their feet, a woven rug tessellated with oval patterns. Enveloped in all this optical dazzlement, and cutting across the frame with their bold, frontal gazes, the women are the very embodiment of dignity and power, mirrors of the independence roiling at the heart of the nation.
Keïta’s legacy continues to send shock waves through Mali’s creative world, and through the arena of contemporary photography. He and his younger contemporary Malick Sidibé were among those to turn Bamako into Africa’s cardinal site of image production—and one of the most important loci of photography in the world. (Since 1994, the city has been the site of the photography biennale Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.) Keïta is lionized in the photo world, and in the art world at large, and rightfully so. But, as with many African image-makers whose work has been accepted by Western institutions, a certain hagiography has been drawn around Keïta’s name which reductively synonymizes it with “African photography.” He and his images are indeed of Mali, but they are more than a mere symbol of Mali. His photographs vibrate with the excess of their ornamentation, with an audacity of presence that exceeds the realm of the emblematic. How radiant is their defiance.
