Malian Photographer Seydou Keita

 

I recently saw a few images of photographer Seydou Keïta who was born 1921 in Bamako, Mali and died November 21, 2001 in Paris, recently on one of my online treks and was blown away.  He was a self-taught portrait photographer who took amazing black and white portraits of people and families between 1940 and the early sixties. Andre Magnin director of the Contemporary African Art Collection, Paris and Geneva sought out the photographer on his own after some of his photographs surfaced in New York at an exhibition and were accredited as unknown…the rest is history. Seydou Keita photographs are now considered as pieces of art.

 

I stumbled upon a book of his portraits by Magnin at a friend Fauzi Fahm's library recently and I could not help but share these amazing photographs.