CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/20/2025

'Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,' on view at Brooklyn Museum

Though most of the photographs in Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens—published to accompany the exhibition on view now at the Brooklyn Museum—are untitled, and most of the sitters unnamed, they are virtually all, somehow, unforgettable. Made in Bamako from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, during the period of time when Mali retook independence, they are remarkable for their individuality, intensity and elegance, as well as the fact that, because of the expense of the materials in West Africa at that time, most of the photographs were made as single shots. Catherine E. McKinley, the exhibition’s guest curator, writes, “Keïta is celebrated for the very painterly, tactile quality of his images—the tones and textures of skin; the complex layers of patterning; the almost tangible sense of his touch made to clothing and hands and faces as he posed sitters and props, so that the viewer seems to touch them, too. He had an innate mastery of light, working in a place where artificial lighting, as Madame Souncko Fofana, his now-octogenarian former sitter remembers, was rare. ‘He had three lights, something that amazed us, especially since there was no electricity here, except in the Governor’s house’ and at the cinema. Still, what animates and appears most luminously in his works are the intimacies he captured, evidence that his lens gained the sitter’s trust.” Featured image is “Untitled” (1959, printed ca. 1994–2001).