October 10, 2025–May 17, 2026, Brooklyn Museum

By Janet Goldner

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In viewing Seydou Keita’s photographs, it is complicated to know whose work you’re looking at. Is it the work of Seydou Keita, the talented Malian photographer whose Malian clients came to his Bamako studio to have their portraits during the 1950’s, the eve of independence? Or is it the work of Andre Magnin and Jean Pigozzi who made Seydou Keita an international art star. In doing so, they altered Keita’s images by greatly increasing the contrast and the scale while ignoring other contemporaneous Malian photographers whose work adds valuable images and context to this crucial period of Malian history.

Keita’s collaboration with his clients to achieve the portraits is notable. Clients brought items they wanted to be photographed with and Keita also had props, clothes, backdrops they could choose. These showed status and aspiration thus including important insights and context in the portraits. The photographs were meant for clients’ personal use, not for exhibition.  Keita kept the negatives in case clients wanted additional prints.

In the early 1990’s, the collector Jean Pigozzi sent his curator Andre Magnan to Bamako to find Keita. Magnan returned to Europe with 921 negatives. The conditions of the transfer, the agreement between Keita and Magnin were the subject of a lawsuit that was resolved in 2008 in favor of Pigozzi and his Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) that now owns Seydou Keita’s archive. The archive is housed in Geneva. It is inaccessible Malians, curators, artists and researchers.

Shortly before his death in 2001, Keita had misgivings about his relationship with Magnin. He formed the Association Seydou Keita to try to resolve the issues and preserve his legacy. Keita was the president of the Association and photographer Alioune Ba was the vice-president. Keita designated Jean-Marc Patrasas his authorized agent. When Keita died, the negatives were still in Magnin’s possession. Ba became the president of the Association.

I knew Alioune Ba and visited the Association at their offices in Lafiabougou. Ba showed me around the space and their exhibition of Keita’s photographs. We spent the afternoon sitting on the veranda talking about the Association, the lawsuit, and how Magnin was playing different factions of Keita’s family against each other. Ba told me that Keita had asked him to preserve his legacy and he had promised to do so.

During the lawsuit, museums and galleries exhibiting Keita’s work were careful to make clear which side of the legal battle they were on.  Were they exhibiting photographs from the Association or those in the possession of Magnin/Pigozzi?

I was in Bamako during the first edition of the Bamako Encounters in 1994 where I saw an exhibition of Keita’s work at the Maison du Combattant. The exhibition featured the original scale photographs made for and in collaboration with Keita’s Malian clients. Many of the photographs in this landmark exhibition are not among the photographs that are now habitually presented in exhibitions of Keita’s work.

In 1997, I attended the opening of a show of Keita’s work at Gaggosian Gallery in New York. This was the first time I saw the enlarged, contrasty images. Seydou Keita, then 76 years old, was in attendance.

The current Brooklyn Museum exhibition is beautifully presented. It introduces Keita’s photographs to a wider public. The differing sizes of the photographs in the exhibition is a welcome innovation in this exhibition. It gives viewers a window into the history of the photographs but without the information that would allow them to understand the history. Keita’s photographs show viewers the beauty, elegance and confidence of Malians on the eve of independence. This is especially welcome at this moment when the news about Mali in the West is all bad all the time.  And when issues of culture are under threat in the US as well.

Almost all of the photographs in the exhibition are from the collections of Pigozzi and Magnan. A few are among the few photographs Pigozzi gifted to the Musee National du Mali. A few negatives, cameras and personal objects are credited to the family.

A soundtrack plays throughout the exhibition adds ambience but it’s not Malian music. The show includes textiles including a wonderful commemorative cloth of Modibo Keita, Mali’s first president, Keita’s cameras and other objects. The textiles bring patterning and fashion from the photographs into the gallery.

Wall texts and a projected video talk about the curator’s insights from interviews with Keita’s family. But I know that there were deep divisions in the family concerning Seydou Keita’s legacy. Some were actively involved with the Association and lawsuit and others, according to Alioune Ba, were tempted by Magnin’s promises of riches. I can only assume the insights are from the part of the family that supported the current owners of Keita’s archive and legacy.

Janet Goldner has had a busy year. Zigzags, her solo exhibition at FiveMyles in Brooklyn, was reviewed in Art Spiel. “Goldner works with specific West African cultural tropes, and her Zigzags are in part inspired by the visual culture of the historical Bamana Empire in Mali (and surrounding countries).” She also participated in several group shows in the NYC area. In March, she presented “Exploring Global Artistic Connections” at TransCultural Exchange’s 2025 International Conference on Opportunities in the Arts (Cambridge, MA). She was awarded a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts’ Le Moulin à Nef Studio Center in Auvillar, France (April 21—May 8), and was selected for the first Sculptors Guild Residency at Tre Luci Studios in Pietrasanta, Italy for the month of June.