![\"Seydou](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/U2PKAMNZXJCY7I4T242QJXLISI.jpg\")
Seydou Ke\u00efta, “Untitled,” 1949-51.Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection \u00a9 SKPEAC\/Seydou Ke\u00efta, courtesy the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection and Danziger Gallery, N.Y.<\/p>\nWithin the larger miracle that is the medium, smaller, specific miracles occur: Robert Frank reducing 27,000+ exposures to 83 photographs, for \u201cThe Americans\u201d; Henri Cartier-Bresson finding himself in so many right places at so many right times, resulting in so many decisive moments; or Seydou Ke\u00efta (1921-2001) in a single right place (Bamako, the capital of Mali) for an extended right time (from the late 1940s and into the early \u201960s) specializing in something so basic as the studio portrait and transforming it into a theme and variations of near-constant vibrancy and vividness.<\/p>\n
As much celebration as retrospective, \u201cSeydou Ke\u00efta: A Tactile Lens\u201d runs at the Brooklyn Museum through May 17. It includes nearly 300 items \u2014 not just photographs, but fabrics, dresses and other garments, jewelry, and, closer to home, five of Ke\u00efta\u2019s cameras, several pairs of his eyeglasses, his national identity card. Even if the several self-portraits on display didn\u2019t give a sense of his personality, and they do, these possessions would.<\/p>\n
Seydou Ke\u00efta, “Untitled,” 1949-51.Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection \u00a9 SKPEAC\/Seydou Ke\u00efta, courtesy the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection and Danziger Gallery, N.Y.<\/p>\n
That word \u201ctactile\u201d in the subtitle takes on two meanings. One is how fully Ke\u00efta\u2019s portraits give a sense of his sitters: It verges on, yes, tactility. The other meaning relates to one of the chief means he used to make his portraits so memorable: the gorgeous designs of the fabrics worn by many of those sitters and of the textiles Ke\u00efta sometimes used as background. They offer a riot of patterning. Delightful to look at in their own right, those fabrics and the clothing being in the show adds to an appreciation of the photographs.<\/p>\n
![\"Seydou](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/QTLV3LH42NGTZMWLBGW42KGBCE.jpg\")
Seydou Ke\u00efta, “Untitled,” 1954.Museum of Modern Art\/The Museum of Modern Art, New Yo<\/p>\n
Go back for a moment to Frank and Cartier-Bresson. Those miracles were the product of extensive travel. So much of Ke\u00efta\u2019s miraculousness has to do with his doing his work in not just a single place but a single space, his studio. There are more than 30,000 negatives in his archive, and we can be certain he took many more that didn\u2019t survive. One would think that with such a very large body of work in a single genre, there would be an inevitable repetitiveness. Instead, the sheer variety of the portraits is (almost) as impressive as their quality.<\/p>\n
How did Ke\u00efta do it? He was as much stage manager, set designer, and even costumer as photographer. Looking at the portraits can become a kind of game, noting the ways Ke\u00efta avoids sameness. It starts, of course, with how Ke\u00efta posed his subjects and the backgrounds he posed them against. But it extends to hats and headgear (kepis, berets, toques, pith helmets, a burnoose), both European and traditional attire, scarves, jewelry, handbags, uniforms (military and athletic), an accordion, a Singer sewing machine, a rifle. <\/p>\n
And that\u2019s just what his clients brought to the sitting. \u201cI also had accessories available,\u201d Ke\u00efta recalled: \u201cwatches, fountain pens, watch chains, plastic flowers, a radio, a telephone, a scooter, a bicycle, and an alarm clock. A lot of people liked to be photographed with that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Seydou](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/EJUFLDSBD5FK5OI56T3SEUHNJI.jpg\")
Seydou Ke\u00efta, “Untitled,” 1957.Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. \u00a9SKPEAC\/Seydou Ke\u00efta, the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection and Danziger Gallery,<\/p>\n
Ke\u00efta charged 300 francs for portraits outside his studio and 400 for inside. His best-known photograph was taken outside. It shows two young women seated on Ke\u00efta\u2019s Vespa. (He also owned a much-loved Peugeot; he used that as a prop, too.) The woman in front wears sunglasses. The other stares at the camera. The intricate designs of their dresses jump out from the blank background and the whiteness of the scooter. There such a sense of impending \u2026 fun. The kickstand is down, but once it\u2019s up \u2014 whoosh \u2014 off they\u2019d go.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did I know my work was special?\u201d Ke\u00efta asked in a 1997 interview. \u201cEveryone wanted me to do their portrait, and everyone would come back afterward and say, \u2018Hey, Seydou, my personality really comes through in that picture you took.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Seydou](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/NWQMHJX6CFCEZBRTX5GXJ66J4I.jpg\")
Seydou Ke\u00efta, “Untitled,” 1949-51.Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. \u00a9 SKPEAC\/Seydou Ke\u00efta, courtesy the Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art and Danziger Gallery, N.Y.<\/p>\n
Viewers have no way of knowing if that really is the personality of the sitter. What we do know \u2014 we can\u2019t help but notice \u2014 is that again and again there\u2019s a sense of a particular person being presented to us. That the sitters are anonymous makes all the more impressive the impression of individual character Ke\u00efta managed to impart. <\/p>\n
How marvelous these pictures would look in color \u2014 or would the effect be too busy? That, too, we can\u2019t know. The marvelousness of what we do have, in black-and-white, is more than sufficient.<\/p>\n
![\"Malick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/LG7BQ3AY6FCZPDN7B5W7W5A43E.jpg\")
Malick Sidib\u00e9, “Regardez-moi! (Look at Me!),” 1962.\u00a9 2025 Malick Sidib\u00e9. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/p>\n
There are several Ke\u00efta photographs in \u201cIdeas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination.\u201d It runs through July 25 at the Museum of Modern Art. He\u2019s among a dozen photographers with work in the show. <\/p>\n
They include his fellow Bamako resident Malick Sidib\u00e9, who was 15 years younger. Sidib\u00e9\u2019s \u201cRegardez-Moi!,\u201d from 1962, takes the anticipatory whoosh of that Ke\u00efta Vespa image and lets it loose on a Malian dance floor. Here in abundance is to be found liberation and exuberance and exhilaration (an exhilaration shared by the viewer). There\u2019s also something more. In English, the title means \u201cLook at Me!\u201d Two years earlier, Mali had gained its independence from France. \u201cIdeas of Africa\u201d is about a continent emerging politically and the concomitant emergence of a powerful cultural consciousness. <\/p>\n
![\"Kwame](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5PAOPPRIURBB3A3P6NZL23BMLM.jpg\")
Kwame Brathwaite, “Untitled (Nomsa with Earrings),” 1964-68. \u00a9 2025 Kwame Brathwaite\u00a9 2025 Kwame Brathwaite<\/p>\n
Most of the photographers are African \u2014 Malian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Congolese, Togolese, Central African, Senegalese, Nigerian, Burkinab\u00e9 \u2014 but there\u2019s also an American, Kwame Brathwaite, as well as Janet Jackson\u2019s \u201cGot \u2018Til It\u2019s Gone\u201d<\/a> video (1997), which was inspired by Sidib\u00e9 and includes allusions to the work of Ke\u00efta and other African photographers. <\/p>\n The video nods to Pan-Africanism<\/a>, with that movement\u2019s emphasis on Africa as a cultural and ideal transcending borders. Another unexpected element in \u201cIdeas of Africa\u201d underscores that: 20 items from Air Afrique, the main provider of air service in francophone Africa. There are in-flight magazines, a matchbox, a key ring, records, books, an Air Afrique suitcase (the logo is very cool). They give a sense of excitement and promise, of \u2014 put it this way, Vespas and Peugeots are all well and good. They\u2019re great. Dance floors, too. But they can\u2019t compare to an Air Afrique Caravelle<\/a>. There\u2019s whoosh, and then there\u2019s whoosh.<\/p>\n SEYDOU KE\u00cfTA: A Tactile Lens<\/p>\n At Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, New York, through May 17. 718-638-5000, www.brooklynmuseum.org<\/a><\/p>\n IDEAS OF AFRICA: Portraiture and Political Imagination<\/p>\n At Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, through July 25. 212-708-9400, www.moma.org<\/a><\/p>\n