“I always told them to relax more: ‘Ok, look over here, try to smile a little, not too much.’ In the end, they like it.”
—Seydou Keïta
These carefully composed studio portraits taken in the 1950s by master photographer Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) originate from the personal collection of French photojournalist and Co-Founder of the Bamako Biennale Françoise Huguier (b.1942). After the two met in 1990, Huguier arranged for some of Keïta’s works to be exhibited internationally for the first time, attracting high-powered attention and leading to Keïta’s worldwide recognition as a definitive photographer of his generation. Printed during the period of the 1994 Bamako Biennale, which showcased Keïta’s talent, the works offered here represent the earliest printing of his portraits outside Mali.
Keïta beautifully presents his sitters as distinguished individuals in nuanced monochrome as seen in these works. Together, they constitute a record of Malian society through a period of transition from a sophisticated French colony to proud independence. The artist later recalled, ‘You can't imagine what it was like for me the first time I saw prints of my negatives in large scale, no spots, clean and perfect...The people in my pictures look so alive, almost as if they were standing in front of me.’
Major retrospectives of Keïta’s work have been held at the Grand Palais, Paris in 2016 and Foam, Amsterdam in 2018.
