JTF (just the facts): A retrospective exhibition hung against blue walls in a series of divided rooms on the museum’s fourth floor. The exhibit was curated by Catherine E. McKinley. (Installation shots below.)

The following works are included in the show:

Self-Portraits

• 7 gelatin silver prints, 1949/later, 1949-1951/later, 1953/vintage, 1956/posthumous, 1958/later, 1959/later, n.d/vintage

Being Bamakois

• 66 gelatin silver prints, 1945-1955/vintage, 1945-1955/later, 1948-1951/later, 1948-1954/later, 1949-1951/later, 1949-1952/later,  c1950/vintage, 1952-1953/later, 1952-1955/later, 1952-1955/posthumous, 1953/vintage, 1953-1957/later, 1954/vintage, 1954/later, 1954-1955/later, 1956/later, 1956-1957/later, 1956-1957/posthumous, 1957/vintage, 1957-1960/later, 1958-1959/later, 1959/later, 1959-1960/later, n.d./vintage, n.d./later, n.d./posthumous
• (vitrine): 1 magazine cover, 1954; 1 magazine spread, 1954
• (vitrine): 10 gelatin silver prints, 1945-1955/vintage, c1950/vintage, 1952-1955/vintage, 1954/vintage, c1954/vintage, n.d./vintage
• (vitrine): 10 gelatin silver negatives, n.d.
• (hanging from ceiling): 8 cotton, weaving, mill spun cotton, imported wool, cotton, 20th century, mid 20th century, mid-1900s, c1970, c1980, 1980

The Pretenders

• 8 gelatin silver prints, 1948-1954/later, 1949/later, 1949-1951/later, 1952-1955/later, 1953-1957/later, 1958-1960/later, 1959/later

Coming of Age

• (vitrine): 9 gelatin silver prints, some with overpainting, c1950/vintage, 1956/vintage, n.d./vintage
• 19 gelatin silver prints, 1948-1954/later, 1949/later, 1949-1951/later, 1950/vintage, c1950/vintage, 1952-1955/later, 1956/later, 1959/later, n.d./vintage

The Elegants

• (vitrine): 5 gelatin silver prints, some with overpainting or gold ink, mid-1900s/vintage, n.d./vintage
• 18 gelatin silver prints, 1948-1954/later, 1949/later, 1949-1951/later, c1950/vintage, 1952-1955/later, 1953/vintage,  1953-1957/later, 1956-1957/later, 1958/later, 1959-1960/later, n.d./later

The Loungers

• 4 gelatin silver prints, 1953-1957/later, 1959/later, n.d./later
• Unknown Senegalese artist: 1 gelatin silver print, 1912/vintage

Keita La

• 5 cameras and accessories
• (vitrine): 1 hat, 1 ID card, 3 state service medals, 2 eyeglasses, 1 Ilford box, 1 gelatin silver print, n.d./vintage
• (lightboxes): 2 gelatin silver negatives, n.d.
• (slideshow): 25 gelatin silver negatives, n.d.
• 1 gelatin silver print, n.d./vintage
• 2 gelatin silver prints, n.d./posthumous (affixed to wall)

Fashioning a New Nation

• Installation of textiles, cloth, printed cotton, dresses, wrappers, shawls, robes, pants, camisoles, earrings, necklaces, coins, hair ornaments, headpieces, hairpieces, blankets, weavings, hats, and other ephemera

Video

• 1 video (color, sound), 2025, 10 minutes 27 seconds

A catalog of the exhibition has been co-published by the Brooklyn Museum (here) and DelMonico Books (here). Edited with text by Catherine E. McKinley. Foreword by Anne Pasternak. Texts by J. Luca Ackerman, Jennifer Bajorek, Duncan Clarke, Thomas Dyja, Howard W. French, Patricia Gérimont, Sana Ginwalla, Awa Konaté, and Drew Sawyer. (Cover shot below.)

Comments/Context: Soon after the medium of photography was first invented in the late 1830s, it became immediately clear that one of things that this new artistic process was actually good for was portraiture, particularly as a lower cost, higher fidelity replacement for painting. Studios soon sprung up to meet the nascent demand, with photographers ready to help their subjects craft their very best likenesses. This wholly familiar story was then repeated countless times around the world over the coming years, almost wherever a camera and an entrepreneurial artist found each other.

When the history of photography began to be more carefully excavated and written, it tended to focus on studio practitioners in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with famous 19th century names like Julia Margaret Cameron leading onward through the decades into the twentieth century, where August Sander, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon, among many others, set up shop. This early focus on Western master photographers inherently led us to make wide ranging general assumptions about photographic portraiture that derive from the cultural, stylistic, economic, and political structures that their pictures directly and indirectly documented. But of course, cameras traveled all over globe, and plenty of portrait studios sprung up over time in Asia, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and elsewhere. And one of the very real dangers we encounter when looking at the work of historical studio photographers from farther afield is that we tacitly measure them by our own version of the Western gaze, instead of stepping back to consider how their studio practices evolved to reflect their own particular circumstances, needs, and subjects – when we observe them though our own filter, or judge them against our own standards, we run the risk of misinterpreting what we discover.

If there is one single important thing to take away from this exhilarating Seydou Keïta retrospective, it is that the pioneering Malian photographer’s images don’t neatly fit into our Western studio portraiture framework, but instead represent an entirely separate African gaze (of an African photographer making images in collaboration with African sitters) that grew up largely unencumbered by Western artistic history. Of course, at some level, there are only so many ways to pose a human being in front of a camera in the space of a studio, and Keïta was indeed somewhat influenced by apprenticeships and early training with other local photographers, but what we find in his work is something uniquely special, a style that reflects not only his own aesthetic point of view but elements of the larger historical context in which he lived and worked.

Surprisingly, this show centers on a very compact span of time, a bit more than a decade in Keïta’s life, from roughly the late 1940s, when he got started in his own studio, to the early 1960s, when due to his accumulated fame as a portrait photographer he was conscripted into the newly independent Malian government to take official pictures; by the time he could extricate himself from that job (in the late 1960s), all of his studio gear had been stolen and he never returned to studio portraiture in the same way. This leaves us to focus on the intensely productive decade of the 1950s, when Keïta was at the height of his powers and when the society around him was shrugging off the influences of French colonialism and coalescing around a new kind of African modernity.

While in his day, Keïta’s portraits were so sought after that sitters would travel from neighboring countries on the Dakar to Bamako train to wait in line to have a chance to get a portrait made, Keïta’s work was essentially invisible to the Western art world until the early 1990s, long after he had given up the medium. Several of his portraits were anonymously included in a 1991 survey of African art in New York, leading the collector Jean Pigozzi to travel to Mali with curator André Magnin to seek out the artists. There they “discovered” Keïta and his younger contemporary Malick Sidibé, and Pigozzi acquired a cache of Keïta’s rare vintage prints, many of which are on view in this show. A gallery show at Gagosian and Keïta’s first monograph followed in 1997, and the rest, as they say, is history. This smartly edited retrospective draws on both the Pigozzi archives as well as rediscovered images in collaboration with the Keïta family, in a range of vintage, later, and posthumous prints, leading to the largest North American presentation of his work ever mounted.

While curator Catherine McKinley has divided the exhibit up into various thematic sections, likely to help break up the flow, these distinctions aren’t really necessary. The truth of the matter is that during the 1950s Keïta had a steady stream of portrait clients that filled up his workdays, and the resulting photographs capture a vibrant (and broad) cross section of Bamako society. There are families and young couples, soldiers and civil servants, parents and children, elders and babies, the wealthy and the less well off, the traditional and the aspirationally modern, those in their finery and others in their everyday wear, each and every one captured in a way that highlights their individuality. Seen as one continuous procession of heterogeneous humanity, the aggregation of Keïta’s portraits builds up a unique visual vocabulary, and offers us a range of clues, in the form of fashions, styles, and poses, that provide compelling visual evidence of a society in transition.

Keïta’s photographic formula was intentionally more flexible that that of his Western counterparts. Portrait photographers like Sander, Penn, and Avedon generally fitted their sitters into their own unique artistic contexts and ways of working, using the deadpan standing pose, the tight corner, and the blank backdrop as signature elements that were repeatedly applied to each sitter; in this way, the artist and his vision are almost more important than whoever might be in front of the camera. Of course, given his relatively modest studio setup, Keïta’s system had its own consistent elements, in particular the use of pattered draped backdrops (often held up by his brothers or other family members), but his approach was much more personalized and collaborative, with the practical goal of delivering a refined portrait that made “someone look really good”. This meant Keïta’s portrait making process was much more active, not passive, artistically distanced, or rigidly documentary – his subjects came with their own aspirations of how they saw themselves (or wanted to look) and he patiently worked with each customer to creatively meet their demands.

What stands out about a Keïta portrait is the consistent intensity of the gaze. At that moment in the history of Mali, photography was still relatively expensive, precious in its own way, and so Keïta made it clear that he was only going to make one exposure of each client (and typically just three prints available the next day). This economy inherently led to the pre-visualized precision of getting everything perfect before the shutter was ever clicked, every fold of clothing placed just right, every hand or arm turned just so, every full body pose arranged with care, every light source placed to maximum effect (particularly with regard to variation in skin tones), and every gaze attentively aimed at the lens, with no margin for error or fooling around. As a result, there is almost no chance, accident, or improvisation in a Keïta portrait – each image is an exercise in crisp potency and controlled forcefulness, every detail sharpened to enhance the particular persona being captured.

What then surrounds this engaged eye-to-eye interaction is a carefully choreographed display of how the sitter wanted to be seen, and Keïta was ready with clothing, accessories, and props (including his Vespa scooter and his Peugeot automobile) that his customers could use to augment their own looks. With Western eyes, we tend to see the elaborate and exotic surfaces in these pictures – layers of boldly patterned fabrics, billowing robes and dresses, golden jewelry, elaborate headscarves and hairstyles, European suits and pith helmets, military uniforms, and symbols of cosmopolitan modernity like radios, watches, and handbags – and from these surfaces, we draw decently obvious conclusions about the mixing of traditional dress and more modern styles in the capital of 1950s Mali, the signaling of class and status, and the aspirational efforts of the younger people of that moment to try out new fashions and hopeful identities.

Unfortunately, we know very little about the specific names and identities of Keïta’s clients, even after much effort spent in trying to track down and pair pictures with people, so we often can’t know for certain who we are looking at. The good news is that in recent decades, deeper scholarship has been applied to Keïta’s portraits in a more general way, painstakingly decoding and consolidating the available details of textiles, jewelry, fashions, and hairstyles, and matching them more precisely with the larger political, economic, and cultural movements and changes taking place in 1950s Bamako. Armed with this contextual information, we can now better understand what a particular hairstyle signified, what a specific twist of headscarf meant to its wearer, what hanging gold coins signaled in terms of wealth or status, where a certain fabric came from (and what its traditions or particular patterns/decorations tell us about whoever was wearing it), what kind of military uniform it was, what a reclining pose on a bed stacked with fabrics was saying, what a pith helmet tells us about a man carrying one, and countless other small observations about the importance of tiny details in the pictures. For those that want to dig into this rich set of learnings, this show is filled with information-packed wall labels, hanging textiles, and a final room of relevant dresses, fabrics, jewelry, and other ephemera, making it possible to make insightful connections between the photographs and some representative examples of physical history.

The photographs in this handsome show thrum with contagiously energetic spirit, channeling the friction of the historical moment where colonial decline meets the economic and political changes that will lead to independence. Keïta consistently sees the confidence in his sitters, their efforts at imaginative self-definition meaning much more to them than a humble trip to the photo studio might imply. These pictures tell a powerful story of visibility, and of a process of becoming, where expressing oneself was a heady exercise in mixing the past and future. Keïta’s portraits eloquently capture the contours of this shifting mood, with a sense of humanity and respect that has made them both highly original and altogether timeless.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are of course no posted prices. The estate of Seydou Keïta is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris/Brussels (here) and Danziger Gallery in New York/Los Angeles (here). Keïta’s prints have been intermittently available at auction in the past decade or so, but very few have been vintage; prices have ranged from roughly $1000 to $46000.