Photos: ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum

Between the late 1940s to the early 1960s, to be photographed by Seydou Keïta was such a coveted thing that people would sometimes travel for up to two days just to get to Bamako, where he lived and worked, so they could do it. Through his photographs, together with the subjects that sat for him, Keïta captured an era of immense social and political transformation in his home country of Mali, from the time when it was part of French Soudan until shortly after its independence as the Republic of Mali in 1960. 

Born in 1921, Keïta was trained by his father to be a carpenter, but it was an uncle’s gift of a camera — a Kodak Brownie Flash, purchased on a trip to Senegal — that laid forth his path. As a teenager, Keïta developed the technical skills of shooting and printing, and went on to open his own photography studio in 1948, which would stand as a legacy to his life and career even after he died in 2001. Specializing in portraiture, he gained a reputation for the quality of his prints and his great sense of aesthetics.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition hones in on Keïta’s singular ability to incorporate details that communicate much about the inner and outer lives of those who sat for his pictures, all of which give a deeper understanding of identity and selfhood as it was felt at the time. Organized thematically, Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens takes viewers through the various portraits and poses that make up much of the Malian photographer’s body of work, including never-shown-before film negatives. 

Small vintage prints hang alongside the larger modern versions, and a selection of garments, jewelry, and textiles akin to those that were often featured in his images are also included in the show, to bring to life some of those indelible elements of Keïta’s photography. Curated by Catherine E. McKinley, the exhibition is informed by oral histories and personal heirlooms from Keïta’s family, and McKinley’s interactions with Keïta’s heirs. 

Below, McKinley takes OkayAfrica through some of the stand-out images from the exhibition:

This is from the section titled Self-Portraiture. [Keïta’s] family was involved in my thinking about the show. I interviewed them [his two sons, Cheickiné and Mamadou], and they helped form my sense of work as a whole. The family was really involved in the studio. When I interviewed them, they talked a lot about holding props as he shot, assisting with equipment, and performing the tea rituals that were at the center of social exchanges.

Family members often waited late into the evening for the final sitters to leave before coming to sleep in the studio — one of the few places in Bamako with electricity — while Keïta worked well into the night in his darkroom. He often used the final frames on a roll of film to photograph himself and his family — intimate and striking images that became part of his oeuvre. These portraits reflect his deeply felt responsibility as a Malinke patriarch, able to provide for his large extended family a life of modern comfort due to an unusual and enviable talent that would reach a world stage.

Keïta was one of the first in Bamako to own a car, and this Vespa [that the women are on]. This is one of his most iconic photos, [both the vintage version and a modern, larger-scale version are in the exhibition]. The women present themselves as aspirational members of the Bamako Vespa Club, whose membership was reserved for men.

Expensive and rare, Vespas were costly symbols of affluence that were inaccessible to most Bamakois in the French colonial economy. Keita, one of the club's founders, purchased his own using the money he made from his photography.

In the Coming of Age section, we see some of the portraits Keïta took where most of the subjects were recently circumcised, or were passing through one ritual or the other. The photos were momentous to that particular time in the lives of young men and women. These small photographs would be used as marriage bids too, and the parents would circulate them amongst families and people from Senegal or other areas of West Africa. These photos were commemorative and keepsakes of religious holidays, too, such as Eid and Tabaski (Eid al-Adha).

This is one of his most well-known images, and you can see Keïta’s own reflection on the car. The smaller, vintage print and the larger, modern one of Keïta’s 1954 photograph highlight the material and historical distinctions between the types of prints on view in the exhibition. Often made by Keïta himself, the vintage print was made around the time the photograph was taken. 

Such works feature a particular range of tonalities — the result of earlier technologies, less environmental control in the darkroom, and the paper's age. The modern prints were made later in Keïta’s life, some of them posthumously. These works are larger, in part, to accentuate the details of the image, such as Keïta’s own reflection on the car's surface.

Following his landmark New York and Paris exhibitions in the 1990s, Keïta came to be known for the distinctive black-and-white tonalities of these modern prints. Reflecting on his work in 1997, Keïta revealed he had always hoped to make large-format prints but seldom had the chance. Sitters rarely requested them due to cost. Together, both vintage and modern prints demonstrate the range and impact of Keïta’s artistry. They also inspire questions about photography's nature as both artwork and heirloom objects imbued with social and ritual meaning as they pass from hand to hand.

For The Pretenders theme, we see the younger generation expressing their discontent with their parents’ generation and embracing French aesthetics and colonial-era fashion. In this image, we see a young boy with one hand on the handlebars of a bicycle and the other tucked in his pocket, who meets the camera with a stern expression. The boy's French beret, shoes, and bicycle — imported goods reserved for the elite — speak to the deep-rooted impact of French colonialism across generations, even as the country moved toward independence.

Keïta’s subjects radiate elegance in every photograph, resplendent in tailor-made ensembles that reflect the wearer's ingenuity and creativity. Many of the outfits seen in Keïta’s portraits blend handwoven West African textiles with Islamic fabrics and imported European cloth, often in inventive ways. The men, women, and youths on view present themselves as mirrors to the cultural syncretism and self-invention of mid-twentieth-century Bamako.

As the Islamic socialist regime rose to power in the 1960s and 1970s, it began imposing increased restrictions on dress, enacting punishments, and "re-education" for the wearing of Western or secular clothing. Keïta’s portraits capture a brief window just before these strictures took hold — a moment when his sitters fashioned an expression entirely their own. He helped document, in the words of Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor, fashion's power to offer people a means of "resistance to confining oneself."