Before his worldwide recognition, Keïta was initially a “studiotiste”, famous in Mali and throughout West Africa, for his understanding of the pose, the quality of his prints and the staging of his portraits. His work bears witness to the changes in urban Malian society during the process of decolonization with independence on the horizon.
Seydou Keïta (born c. 1921, Bamako, Mali, ded in 2001, Paris, France) is unanimously regarded today as the most famous African studio photographer of the 20th century. Discovered in the West in the early 1990s, his work, composed essentially of black and white portraits made in his studio in Bamako from 1948 to 1962, has since been exhibited in major museums and written about in numerous publications. But before his talent was recognized worldwide, Keïta was initially a “studiotiste” who was very famous in Mali and throughout West Africa, thanks to his understanding of the pose, the quality of his prints and the staging of his portraits, in which the accessories bear witness to the changes in urban Malian society during the process of decolonization with independence on the horizon.
Born in Bamako, Mali, sometime between 1921 and 1923, Seydou Keïta worked in his youth as a carpenter, following the profession of his father Bâ Tièkoro. In 1935, he began taking pictures of family, neighbors, friends, and clients at his father’s workshop, using the Kodak Brownie camera brought to him from Senegal by his uncle Tièmòkò Keïta. The following decade, the artist purchased two more cameras and by 1949 made photographs professionally under the tutelage of his neighbor Mountaga Dembélé. Like his mentor, Keïta operated an outdoor studio in the courtyard of the Doumbia family compound, where he rented a room, in the neighborhood of Bamako-Kura. Around this time, Keïta purchased a used 13 x 18 inch view camera with a broken shutter from another guide, Pierre Garnier, at Photo-Hall Soudanais. Primarily illuminated with sunlight, all of his portraits from 1949 to 1962 were taken with this camera, which Keïta mastered by removing the lens cap for a precise period of time to properly expose the film. To promote his business, he stamped “Photo Keïta Seydou” on the back of the images and hired assistants to find clients at the nearby market and railway station.
By 1952, Keïta had achieved financial success as a locally renowned portrait photographer. Serving elite and middle-class patrons, his images often highlight the idealized or imagined socio-economic status of his sitters through the inclusion of props: cosmopolitan clothing and accessories, radios, telephones, bicycles, and sometimes his own car. To formalize the outdoor setting, Keïta regularly employed richly patterned backdrops that add movement and visual energy to his images and used a low vantage point and angular composition to highlight his clients’ confident facial expressions and relaxed postures. Alongside his studio practice, Keïta visited people’s homes to compose portraits and traveled to rural towns to take identification photographs.
In 1962, Keïta began working for the government by taking “mug shots” of prisoners at police headquarters downtown. (These images were purportedly destroyed in fires set during riots associated with the 1991 coup d’état.) During the early 1960s, his brother Lacina, son Mamadou, and assistants Abdoulaye and Mouris ran the studio business. By the time Keïta retired from the studio in 1977, his equipment had been stolen, leading him to transform the space into a garage.
In 1992, French photographers Bernard Descamps and Françoise Huguier, and contemporary art dealer André Magnin, arrived at his shop in search of Keïta—the unidentified photographer whose work had been featured in the exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The following year, Keïta’s credited photographs were presented by Huguier and Descamps to overseas audiences for the first time at the Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Arles, France. Subsequently, Keïta undertook fashion shoots for Harper’s Bazaar and designer agnès b., and his work has appeared in numerous exhibitions such as In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, Guggenheim Museum (1996); ¡Flash Afrique!, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2001); You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2001; traveled to Hammer Museum of Art, University of California, Los Angeles [2002]; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida [2002–03]; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta [2003]), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2002; traveled to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin [2001]; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago [2001]; and MoMA PS1, New York [2002]), and Africa Remix, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (2004; traveled to the Hayward Art Gallery, London [2005]; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris [2005]; Mori Art Museum [2006]; and Johannesburg Art Gallery [2007]). His monographs include Seydou Keïta (1997) and Seydou Keïta Photographs (2011). His photographs have also been featured at international festivals and biennials in Bamako (1994), São Paulo (1998), and Madrid (1999). Honoring Keïta’s lifetime achievements, the Rencontres de Bamako grand prize is named the Seydou Keïta Award. Keïta died in Paris on November 22, 2001.
Candace M. Keller https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita