Seydou Keita

Last fall, when CLH and I were traveling through Europe, we visited the Tate Modern in London. Eight years before, when I was in London studying abroad, the Tate Modern had it’s grand opening on the week of my birthday. I had always wanted to take CLH there.

We saw lots of exhibitions of modern arts from famous painters (Mondrian is always a favorite) and we rented these crazy iPod-like AV devices that go into so much detail it would be impossible to tour the whole museum in a single day.

But the exhibit that stuck with me most was the photography of Seydou Keita. Keita photographed ordinary Malians, his own neighbors, who would come to them in their finest clothes and with their favorite props. Sunglasses, hats, musical instruments, jewelry and other notions of wealth factor heavily in the charm of the images. Usually Keita just posed his subjects in from of a sheet of fabric, sometimes ornate woven weavings, other times a simple white cloth. It was street photography before there were streets to photograph.

Here is an interview with him and here is a NYT audio slideshow about him that is very, very worth listening to.