Talk of the town

ArtForum, Feb, 1998 by Manthia Diawara

When an exhibition of Seydou Keita's photographs opened recently in SoHo, I was intrigued by the statement made by a West African colleague of mine: This is exactly like it was in those days. That yellow convertible, the first Cadillac in Mali, everyone remembers as belonging to Sylla, the antique dealer in Bamako. And this one, with the long tribal scars from his sideburns to his chin, must have been a Mossi soldier. The one over there's a grande dame with her fancy scarf, her gold rings alongside the strands of her cornrowed hair, her tattooed lower lip, and her gold choker necklace with a large pendant.

To say that Seydou Keita's portraits tell the truth about the people in Bamako, the capital city of the former French Sudan (now Mali) in the '40s and '50s, is in fact to say that his camera made them into Bamakois. To get at this truth, which so excited my West African friend in SoHo, one must examine the relationship between Keita's work and the myth of Bamako - to ask what was being acted out by his subjects, what they hoped to achieve by posing for his camera. Finally, there is the question as to what we see in these pictures today that so stubbornly grabs hold of our attention.

Keita's Bamako is the Bamako at the birth of modernity in West Africa. Each one of his portraits reveals an aspect of that moment, its mythology and attendant psychology. In his attempt to create great Bamakois "types" with his camera, Keita participated in shaping the new image of the city, which emerged in 1946 (with the first meeting of the francophone Congres de Bamako) as an important French colonial center. His studio was located not far from the train station, which served to link the city and Dakar, in turn bringing it closer to Paris, and was near another great agent of modernization, the large market of Bamako (le Marche Rose), a trading center that was the envy of every other West African city. There, commerce and consumption brought together villagers of various ethnic groups and redefined them as Bamakois. Other key sources of the modern experience, the central prison and the Soudan Cine movie theater, were landmark sites in Bamako-Coura (the new Bamako), Keita's neighborhood. The proximity of his studio to the Soudan Cine explains the impact the cinematic, black-and-white mise-en-scene would have on his style. The tough-guy looks and gangsterlike demeanor found in his photos seem straight out of a B-movie still.

Having a portrait taken by Keita signified one's cosmopolitanism. It registered the fact that the sitter lived in Bamako, had seen the train station, the big market, and the central prison, and went to the movies: in short, it signified that the sitter was modern. If such urbanity was one of the enduring markers of Bamako identity, another concerned the beauty of the city's women: "A Bamako les femmes sont belles," in the words of the popular song. For women, Keita's camera was a guarantee of beauty, fulfilling the truth of their being Bamakoise. His portraits were said to make any woman beautiful: give her a straight and aquiline nose, emphasize her jewelry and makeup, and capture a sense of her modernity through the attention paid to her high-heel shoes and handbag.

In contrast to other Bamako photographers (e.g., Sakaly in the neighborhood of Medina-Coura, and Malick Sidibe in Bagadadji), Keita remained seriously committed to the genre of studio photography. He rigorously maintained a mise-en-scene that dictated the camera position and angle in relation to the subject. The decor often included such props as chairs, flowers, wristwatches, pens, radios, and a curtain in the background. The subjects, desirous of becoming Bamakois, stood, sat, or reclined for him like models in front of a painter. They always came out idealized, always already belonging to the past like objects of nostalgia, and stamped as the photographer's products.

The painterly quality of Keita's portraits derives from the way the subjects are absorbed by the environment of his studio. Take, for example, his portrait of two women sitting on the grass in front of his curtain backdrop with its signature arabesque patterns. The two women - one wears a black dress with large white dots, the other a flower-print number - fit comfortably in this artificial landscape. They sit shoulder to shoulder as if Siamese twins, their headscarves falling in the back like foliage and revealing gold ornaments in their hair. The two mimic each other's every movement, with their loose dresses spread out to cover their knees and feet. Each rests an arm on a knee, with an equal number of gold bracelets on their bared wrists as well as a single band on their respective ring fingers. Somehow the grass surrounding the women conveys the passage of nature into the portrait, which the arabesque background and colorful dresses do nothing to negate. In fact, looking at the image, one gets the feeling of being in front of an Impressionist tableau, in which civilization imitates nature.