KEITA, Seydou - Photographs. Bamako, Mali 1949-1963

Background information

"Seydou KEITA was born in Bamako, Mali in 1921, then part of the colony of French Sudan* and a bustling transportation hub on the route to Dakar. With a Kodak Brownie given to him by his uncle, Seydou KEITA took up photography at the age of fourteen, going on to establish what would become Bamako’s most successful portraiture enterprise of the 1950s and 1960s
* On September 22, 1960, the former colony of French Sudan had formally declared its independence under the name Republic of Mali.

Content

The editor of this lavishly designed book of photographs, 'Seydou Keita. Photographs, Bamako, Mali 1948-1963', was able to draw from an expanded archive compared to the monograph published by Scalo in 1997; the volume contains over 400, mostly unpublished portraits from the photographer's heyday in the center of Bamako. Seydou KEITA provided his subjects with lushly patterned backgrounds and props - bicycles, radios, musical instruments, for example - that have come to be helpful in dating the various periods in the portrait photographer's career. In addition, he often styled his sitters, but also encouraged them to actively participate by hanging sample portraits in the studio for inspiration. Migrant youth, government officials, shopkeepers, and Bamako's cultural elite are all represented here. And while Seydou KEITA's photographs served as both a family record and a cultural status symbol for the clients who commissioned them, these images became a permanent visual record of Mali at the time." (© Steidl Verlag, 2011)

About the Malian photographer, Seydou KEITA (1923-2001)

Photo books and catalogues on the work of Seydou KEITA