Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens

Published with Brooklyn Museum.

Seydou Keïta's photographs capture Malian culture during an era of radical transformation. As a commercial portrait photographer, Keïta had a remarkable ability to draw out tactile details and emotions from his subjects, creating strikingly intimate portraits that have resonated with audiences across geographic and cultural borders. In 1948, Keïta opened one of the city's first photography studios. Located in Bamako-Coura, the city's colonial center, the studio attracted clientele from across the country and West Africa. Keïta offered bold, patterned backdrops and props—including cars, Vespas and European clothing and accessories—that allowed sitters to explore new ways of fashioning the self before the camera's lens.
This groundbreaking publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, draws from across Keïta's rich oeuvre—spanning iconic portraits and rarely seen vintage prints to never-before-shown negatives—to explore the social and political realities of the period. The catalog was informed and enriched by contributions from the Keïta family, including their generous loan of negatives from the family archive and oral histories. Richly illustrated and supported with texts from leading scholars and writers, this book is the essential volume on Seydou Keïta.
Born in Bamako, Mali, Seydou Keïta (1921/23–2001) spent his youth working as a carpenter, following in the footsteps of his father. He shifted his focus to photography after receiving a Kodak Brownie Flash camera as a gift from his uncle in 1935. Between 1948 and 1963, Keïta photographed thousands of Malians and West Africans, becoming widely recognized across the region. In the early 1990s, his work reached Western viewers, cementing Keïta as one of the premier studio photographers of 20th-century Africa—a peer of August Sander, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.