An interview with guest curator Catherine E. McKinley on Keïta’s legacy and the Brooklyn Museum exhibition in New York
Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1949–51, printed ca. 1994–2001. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Musée national du Mali. © SKPEAC/Seydou Keïta, courtesy The Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art and Danziger Gallery, NY
The Brooklyn Museum opens ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ on 10 October 2025, the most expansive North American exhibition of the pioneering Malian photographer to date. Curated by Catherine E. McKinley, author of The African Lookbook and director of The McKinley Collection, in collaboration with curatorial assistant Imani Williford, the exhibition features nearly 275 works alongside rare textiles, jewellery, and personal belongings that immerse visitors in the world of mid-twentieth-century Bamako.
McKinley emphasises Keïta’s ability to render the “tactile” in his portraits, where fabric, accessories, and staging become more than backdrops—they are central to understanding how Malians expressed identity and modernity during a time of dramatic political change. “We can visually ‘finger the grain’ of the sitter’s lives and better understand them beyond just their relationship to studio photography,” she explains. Through this lens, Keïta’s studio emerges as much of a social stage as it is an artistic one, where individuality and cultural transformation were performed and preserved.
Installation view of ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Doyon
Stephan Rheeder: Keïta’s Bamako studio welcomed everyone from local villagers to international travellers. How do you envision his studio functioning not just as a place of photography, but as a social and cultural stage where people experimented with their identities?
Catherine McKinley: One of the enduring myths about Keïta’s oeuvre is that it primarily represents Bamako’s middle class. The middle class would have been very tiny in 1948 to 1963, as the city’s population was under 50,000 for much of the period between the mid-1940s until independence, by which point it nearly tripled. A close examination of the photos reveals an incredibly pluralistic, complex, rapidly shifting world of elites and regular citizens, civil servants, nobility, migrant labourers, nomadic persons, the highly educated, Muslim, Christian, and animist believers, and the many West African émigrés and travellers, as his heirs recall, who made their way to his studio. This is all happening in a society still very much bound by ancient caste hierarchies, while also struggling under the rigidities of an imposed French class system.
We see sitters who were already bending every social notion, as evidenced by the blending of Malian, European, Moroccan, and other North African, Arab, and Asian dress styles, accessories, and staging. This is also reflected in the broad range of African textile traditions represented in their work. Keïta’s studio became a theatre for trying on and expressing countless social selves.
Installation view of ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Doyon
The exhibition title emphasises Keïta’s ability to render the “tactile.” Could you expand on how texture, clothing, and material culture in his portraits contribute to a deeper understanding of Malian society during this transformative period?
His photography is beloved for its patterning, tonalities, complexity, and design repetitions. In his work, there is a tactility, as if you can touch the nap of the weave and feel one’s way into the space Keïta created in and around his studio. We are thus granted a kind of emotional narrative that we don’t otherwise have access to, given that most of his sitters’ identities and personal stories are lost to history.
The material culture of the city is very much alive in the photos. In keeping with Malian and broader African notions that objects are charged with spirit, textiles serve as containers of spirit, both living and ancestral, making the sitter’s and viewer’s relationship with touch and objects that much more powerful.
Installation view of ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Doyon
This exhibition includes rare negatives and never-before-seen works from the Keïta family’s collection. How do these discoveries shift or complicate our understanding of his practice and his legacy?
The Keïta family very generously loaned us 75 slides, only a selection of which are on view due to conservation limitations. These slides were in his possession at the time of his death and had never been published or exhibited. The dates of these works span approximately from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. It’s fascinating to look at these works against what is previously considered “known” of his oeuvre. These negatives both provide bookends to and fill gaps in his known oeuvre, which officially dates back to 1948. Many of them seem very contemporary, but are in fact quite old, challenging how we understand the relationship between Keïta’s work and African modernism.
We gain new insights from the materiality of these and other rare vintage photos on view in the show, which are distinct from the stark black-and-white prints typically made for the Western art world, the images most familiar to audiences. The vintage prints’ distinctive sizes, colouring, and signs of handling and age reflect their status as not only art objects but also social objects meant to connect people. Together, these works demonstrate to audiences how a distinctly African mode of photography emerged.
Installation view of ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Doyon
Since his Western debut in the 1990s, Keïta’s photographs have had a profound influence on art, fashion, and design worldwide. What does it mean, in your view, to reintroduce his work to North American audiences on such a scale more than three decades later?
Several people, including some curators and photographers with access to various art spaces and archives, have told me that they are excited to see a Keïta work in person for the first time. His work and the aesthetics it has inspired have deeply influenced pop culture, fashion, and mass media, becoming an aesthetic universalised as “African” and immediately recognisable to many. Despite this, many have never truly experienced his works on paper beyond reproductions in the media.
They haven’t spent time in a room with tiny vintage prints, experiencing their absolute singularity —the specificity of Keïta’s artistry, their materiality, the tears in the paper, his handwriting at the paper’s edge, the tonal drama. Each vintage print bears the traces of time, the exchange of hands, and the particles of Mali’s red earth. I’m very excited to see how visitors respond to these images.
Installation view of ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Doyon
Keïta is often positioned alongside Western photographers such as Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, but also within the African modernist tradition. How do you hope this exhibition reframes his place in the broader history of portraiture and photography?
The most important reframing, I think, is that the show reanimates Keïta’s legacy and asks viewers to delve deeper beyond their basic understanding of his work and truly inquire about the artist and the world he created. The Keïta family helped me to identify one living former sitter, who is interviewed in a video shown in the exhibition. What else might we uncover in traces of his subjects’ lives?
Over the last twenty years, a significant amount of research has been conducted into African photography, illuminating key aspects of this specific artistic tradition. However, we are only just starting to move beyond a universalising of artist history, aesthetics, notions of power, and “the gaze.” These are some of the questions that enliven an already electric installation.
How was it that Keïta, in 1948, became Soudan’s second photographer, almost a century after African photographers in Senegal (once part of French Soudan’s borders) emerged around 1865 alongside a community of African Americans, Arabs, Lebanese, and Europeans? Who was Keïta, the man, and how was he, as a somewhat lone figure, able to harness a remarkable creative, psychic, social, and economic freedom in a highly restricted, inaccessible, contested medium? What is the true nature of his relationship to what the West calls “modernism,” a universalised notion, which in Mali has its own very ancient legacy, interrupted violently by colonial and European ideas under the same name?
On view at the Brooklyn Museum from 10 October 2025 to 8 March 2026. Learn more at the Brooklyn Museum.
