← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
“Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens” Celebrates the Famous West African Photographer
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. From the 1940s through the 60s, legendary photographer Seydou Keita developed a studio practice showcasing his clients in the finest fabrics, suits and jewelry during a time of political unrest in his home country of Mali. Now, a Brooklyn Museum exhibition reflects on the artist's work in one of his most expansive North American retrospectives. It's titled Seiru A Tactile Lens, including more than 280 works such as Never Be Seen, Never Before Seen, Portraits, Textiles and Necklaces. The show explores Seduketa's life and career through the lens of a burgeoning nation. Mali's independence was on the horizon. It became free from French rule on September 22, 1960. Mali had already begun forging a new cultural identity informed by its own rich pre colonial history, deeply rooted Islamic tradition, plus the effects of French colonization. It's all captures in Keita's images. The New Yorker magazine stated that Keita's legacy continues to send shock waves through Mali's creative world and through the arena of contemporary photography. Seydouketa's A Tactile Lens is on display at the Brooklyn Museum through May 17, and the film featured in the show, Keta La, will also be featured in the 33rd New York African Film Festival in May. Joining us now to discuss is guest curator Kathryn McKinley, who organized the show. Hi Kathryn.
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Kathryn McKinley
Hey, how are you?
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Alison Stewart
I am doing well and we're also joined by Brooklyn Museum's Curator Photography Pauline Vermar. Hi Pauline.
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Pauline Vermar
Hi, Lovely to be back.
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Alison Stewart
Listeners, are you a fan of Seydou Keita's work? What is it that resonates with you the most? Have you seen Seydou Keita's exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum? Call and tell us your thoughts about this exhibition. Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc Katherine, when did you first learn about Keita's work?
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Kathryn McKinley
I first saw Keita's work in 1991. It was displayed at the then African Art Museum in Queens, and it was displayed anonymously. There were three or four prints that were really intriguing and kind of captured everybody's imagination. And then it propelled people to go to Mali and investigate who he was. And he was soon part of the international art scene.
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Alison Stewart
He began taking photos at just 12 years old. Catherine, can you tell us a little bit about his background and how he got into photography?
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Kathryn McKinley
Kada was the son of a very skilled craftsman who worked with his brother Keda's uncle, who actually introduced him to his first camera. And Keita was completely unschooled. He had some Koranic school training and he was otherwise working in the workshop with his father and uncle. And the uncle traveled to a family event in Senegal, which was part of the same larger colony, and came back with a small brownie camera. And Kada commandeered the camera and that was kind of history. From there he was completely self trained until he was in his twenties, and then had interaction with a local French owned photographer and owner of a photographic material store.
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Alison Stewart
I like how he said he'd commandeered it. Pauline, why did you feel like now was the right time for a retrospective of Seito Keda's work?
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Pauline Vermar
So this conversation, I believe this was a long time coming. This exhibition actually was. The museum had been wanting to show the work of Seduketa for many years, and Catherine McKinley was really who came in to the story and made it possible. And it's actually a wonderful timing that the show is now at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel like we need to see Seiru Keita's work at the moment. It feels good. It's incredibly relevant, obviously to our times, but also to Brooklyn. And so we feel like it couldn't have been better timing.
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Alison Stewart
Catherine, I understand you spent quite a bit of time with Kerou Seda's family. I'm excuse me's family in Mali. First of all, what did you want to find out from these people?
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Kathryn McKinley
Well, at first I was approaching this archive of 30,000 images and it was overwhelming. And I was thinking, there's so many gorgeous photos, but how do we make meaning of them? And the question of who Saito Keda was was kind of foremost because there's a lot that's misunderstood. There's a lot of information that's missing. He was famously enigmatic. And so I decided it would be good to touch down in Mali. I'd been to Mali before, but I had never attempted to meet the family or to visit the old studio space. So I just decided to go and to see what I could find. And what I found was a very, very welcoming family who were eager to share information and really shared intriguing information that changed my completely changed my perspective and really informed the curation of the show.
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Alison Stewart
What was something they shared that really made it into the show, I think
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Kathryn McKinley
really the life of the family in the studio. We think about studio photography as this kind of private experience between the photographer and the sitter, where you become this person within four walls. And Keda was really, for the most part, shooting out on the street and in the family compound. His studio was right at the edge of the family compound. It's a large compound there. When I visited, there were more than 200 family members living there. And it's a compound that they own since the 1900s. So it has a lot of, you know, historic feeling and kind of a long history as a family community. And I really met something very close to the environment he would have worked in. And I met children who grew up holding the backdrops and participating in all of the conversations, the tea ceremonies, the complete culture of the studio.
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Pauline Vermar
And I would like to add to this to Catherine's you thanks to Catherine McKinley, the museum. The exhibition includes material that has never been seen before, those negatives that we are showing in the show as a slideshow and light boxes. And this is all thanks to those connections with the family that Katherine McKinley made when she traveled there.
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Alison Stewart
A Brook Museum exhibition shows some of West African photographer Setu Keita's defining portraits. Guest curator Kathryn McKinley joins us alongside the museum's photography curator Pauline Vermar to discuss A Tactile Lens, which is on display through May 17th. Listeners, are you a fan of Seydu Keita's work? What is it that resonates with you? Have you been to the museum and seen the exhibit? Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC Pauline 1 of the first images you see in this exhibition is a self portrait of Keita. How does Keita's images of himself and his family, as we've learned, communicate to the viewer what his values are?
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Pauline Vermar
That's a very good question because we always spend quite a lot of time in that little room. So it's the introduction to the show, really. It's all self portraits, including his kids, in fact, some of whom have now been the main actors of this exhibition, now adults and help with the curation and the content of the show. I think one of the things that strikes me and many people the most is the way that Kata looks or actually doesn't look into the camera. There's a subtlety to his gaze and a kindness, a gentleness, I would say, to his Persona. There's an aura that will inform the whole exhibition. What kind of man was he? What kind of relationship did he have with the camera and with photography? And all of those very nuanced traits of character, I would say that really are obvious from the start. And I love that Catherine found so many of those and collected so many of the self portraits and portraits of the family, because it really does carry through all the way into the show. What are we looking at and who took those photographs?
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Alison Stewart
And for listeners, if you would like to see some of his work, you can go to our Instagram llofitnyc and you can see some of his images on our stories as we're having this conversation. Catherine, what sort of themes or motives, motifs did you notice while you were looking through all of these images?
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Kathryn McKinley
Surprisingly, I mean, I approached Kate at first thinking about all of the. What I call the beautiful flowers, because there's a succession of really beautiful women who are in their finery and looking at it again through the family lens. I started. What started to emerge was really a political story, a story of community, and also a story of a strength and kind of, I don't know the word, like an agency in those women that goes beyond the kind of surface of their beauty or their elegance.
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Alison Stewart
How did you decide on the organization of the show?
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Kathryn McKinley
It emerged. It's the kind of wonderful process of curation, is that you go in with ideas and then particularly working in a museum, you're with a team and you're in conversation all the time, and they're constantly kind of challenging and bringing other aspects of information and expertise to the conversation. So it's a very dynamic process. So the process itself moved from one place to another over two years in a really kind of wonderful unfolding. So what you see at the end is a show with a lot of multiple entry points, a very kind of complex narrative that came out of, for instance, conversations with Pauline about some of the more technical aspects of photography that are not my forte or somebody else's challenge to particular ideas. So it's really. It's a. It's a wonderful process. I'm a writer by training. I tend to work all alone in a room. So this was a conversation that was really pretty wonderful. It's like photography itself. It's this constant unfolding and Looking at new details and discovering new things and something you think you know.
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Pauline Vermar
And one of the big questions, I should say, also was, you know, photography and textile intertwined, entwining like this in this large space. That was one of the recurring conversations. You know, where do the textiles go? How do we display and everything that Catherine had collected or borrowed from institutions in Mali and other places, you know, where will this go to highlight your research, Catherine? Research the best as possible.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. Pauline, please explain for our listeners how textiles are woven into the show.
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Pauline Vermar
Well, I'll describe it, but I think Catherine McKinley should talk about the textiles themselves. So as you enter the space, it's a very large, beautiful exhibition. And so as you enter the space, you have a first glimpse at what is coming along farther along in the show. You have beautiful textiles hanging from the ceiling, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Catherine, but from Malise and Nagel and Niger, one of them, yes. And then as you move along into those galleries, you approach a room at the very end. In fact, it's not the end, it's the middle of the show, because you come back on your steps and you arrive in this incredible room that's all textiles and jewelry and all sorts of the items that are in the photographs. And that way, as you go to the textiles, you focus on the photographs, and as you come back from that room with the textiles, you have them in your mind, and it plays with the whole color in black and white. The photos are in black and white. The textiles are in color and indigo. And so you now, as you come back and look at the photographs, once again, you have that. It's the new way of looking at the photographs. And I think this is a really very interesting mind game almost. There's something going with that visualization of the textile that really enhances the experience quite a lot.
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Kathryn McKinley
Mm. The textiles themselves represent innovations from, really, the 11th B.C. they're fragments of the very same textiles that were taken by archaeologists from caves and various places in Mali. And so you get to see this kind of evolution of textile development, particularly at the moment of independence, where there's a very rapid innovation in design ways. And those designs show up in Keita's photography. So it's a kind of wonderful. It's not just this idea of tactileness. Materiality is very, very important to the show and even to our sense of the photographs themselves, but it's also a way to kind of look at this issue of modernism that Keita captured like no one else has.
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Caller Host
We got A text here that says, seydu Keita's exhibit is great. I've seen it at least three times. I love the addition of fabric, his camera, glasses, same style I wear, and the beautiful Malayan music, including Salif Keita playing some of the space. Thanks for a great exhibition. Let's talk to Kay, who's calling in from Westchester. Hi, Kay, thank you for taking the time to call. All of it.
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Kay (Caller)
Hi, Allison, thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I haven't seen the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum yet, but I'm super excited for it. I saw C. Duqueta exhibition in Paris about 10 years ago and I saw it with a group of black expats who are just part of a meetup, who are just looking for friendship and community in Paris. And the exhibition was where we met up and looking at Keith's work. First of all, the sheer size of the photographs really, really captured me, as well as the just arresting amount of texture between the backdrop of the textiles and the style of the hair of these beautiful, beautiful women. And also the black and white aspects of some of these photos as well. And it led to one lifelong friendship that has also led to me doing research in Benin and learning more about West African aesthetics. So it was a real entry point and turning point for me. And the work on its own is really a gift and I can't wait to revisit it here at home.
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Caller Host
Oh, it sounds like it was a life changing experience for you. That's fabulous, Kay. Thank you so much for talking to us. Katherine, I want to ask you about a photo of a small boy. He's sort of in French garb. He's got a beret and a short sleeve marionette. He's looking directly into the camera. What's going on at this image that gets to a major part of the show?
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Kathryn McKinley
Yeah, that's a really iconic image, a wonderful image. I think Keda himself, because he accrued a lot of wealth through his photographic practice, bought things like berets for his children. It was kind of part of the culture of the household. Those were kind of rare and expensive imported items. And we talk about those photos as the. We talk about the subjects of those photos as the quote, unquote, pretenders that they were people who have been traditionally seen as colonized subjects, who loved France too much. So they were criticized by their children for their portrayal in these photos and for their love of that portrayal. But it really gets to Molly's position in that very moment between 1948 and 1962, which was the short period of Cada's practice. And it gets at this kind of interesting syncretic nature of the society that I think is really misunderstood. Because if you start to really study the photos, you see these really interesting tensions and a kind of humor that emerges about the relationship between Mali and France. And what we also don't see is the really deep relationship between Cuba, between Latin American culture, which also had a huge influence on Mali at the time. So just as much as French music was beloved, and you see the accordion players, et cetera, what we don't necessarily have an awareness of is also this kind of revolutionary culture that was impacting Malians sense of self and their awareness of the world. And there was also a pretty deep critique of France at the same time. The ways in which people wore their headgear or a scarf was also a kind of. It expressed a sense of humor and a critique as well. So people weren't passively engaging with French culture.
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Caller Host
Pauline, what is one image that you want people to spend an extra 10 seconds in front of?
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Pauline Vermar
Well, so we talked about the large black and white photographs and of course that's what Seydouketa became very well known for. And they're incredible. Some of them are larger than life and really people should come and see them for themselves. It's really very impressive. But what I love about the curation of Catherine McKinley is those little vintage prints as well. And they're all shown together. And one of them, I always say, is my favorite photo in the show. It's the print and the image that I love. I love that it's a vintage print, it's a small object, and it's two women on a scooter, on a Vespa. And there, there's so much joy coming out of this image. And I think it's. And it's one of his well known photographs. It's close to the entrance of the show. So if, you know, when everybody comes see the show, comes back to see the show, don't miss it. Because it really, for me, it encapsulates the spirit of not only the exhibition, but I would say, Seduke, that the way he photographed women is extraordinary. There was a sense of freedom in that studio. I would say people spent a lot of time with him. Right. Getting ready for the right shot. Is it true that he only shot once?
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Kathryn McKinley
Yes. Right. Everybody was allowed one shot, which is
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Pauline Vermar
incredible when you think about it. And so to have those two women with the Vespa. Yeah, that would be my favorite.
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Caller Host
How about for you, Catherine?
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Kathryn McKinley
I think there's one I have a lot of affection for. It's a large man in a large, oversized. His name was Bilali and he's in a very beautiful booboo and he's holding a child on his lap who has the kind of the same visage. And that one, it's just, it's an extremely joyful photograph. But then there's an interesting backstory because he was friends with Keda, he spent a lot of time around the studio. And Keda was famously, he started a lot of clubs and was part of a lot of social clubs. And he and Bilali were part of this club called the Gentlemen. And they were dandies. They were well dressed men and close friends. And that one just, it's so joyous. And the idea of these brotherhoods, there were typically a lot of Islamic brotherhoods that then progressed into these social brotherhoods. And I just think that that photo is really a special one.
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Alison Stewart
I've been Speaking with Katherine McKinley and Pauline Vermar. The name of the exhibit is Seiru Keita A Tactile Len. It's on display through May 17th at the Brooklyn Museum. Thanks for joining us.
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Pauline Vermar
Thank you so much.
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Kathryn McKinley
Mm.
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