Seydou
Keïta
Photographer
S
S
eydou Keïta was a Malian photographer known for his black-and-white portraits
of friends, family, and neighbors. Running a commercial portrait studio, the artist captured
many idiosyncratic details of time and place, including the traditional patterned dresses of
his female sitters. “It's easy to take a photo, but what really made a difference was that I
always knew how to find the right position, and I never was wrong,” he once said. “Their
head slightly turned, a serious face, the position of the hands—I was capable of making
someone look really good.” Born c. 1921 in Bamako, Mali, he worked as a carpenter with
his father as a young man. Keïta first began taking photographs after receiving a Kodak
Brownie camera as a gift from his uncle. By 1949, he had established a studio in a small
courtyard nearby one of Bamako's prisons. After having much of his equipment stolen over
during the 1970s, the artist shuttered his studio space in 1977. In 1992, two French
photographers Bernard Descamps and Françoise Huguier, traveled to Mali in search of
Keïta, having seen his work in a recent show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York. The Frenchmen and their gallerist subsequently introduced Keïta's work to an
international audience, leading to opportunities that included a photo campaign for
Harper's Bazaar during the mid-1990s. The artist died on November 22, 2001 in Paris,
France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York, the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, among others.
Refrence: www.artnet.com