Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) was a Malian photographer.
A portrait photographer, he used a large format camera. Beginning photography in 1949, he installed a studio in his courtyard. From 1962 to 1977, he was a photographer with the national intelligency.
Presented for the first time in France, in Rouen by Pierre Olingue, during the 3rd Rencontres photographiques de Normandie, dedicated to African photographers, in May 1993. Afterwards exhibited thanks to Françoise Hughier at the Rencontres internationales de la photographie d'Arles in 1994, At the Cartier Foundation in Paris in 1994 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996.
A "Seydou Keïta" Prize is awarded at the African Photography Meetings in Bamako.
The work of Seydou Keïta is displayed again in Paris, at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées, between March and July 2016, in partnership with the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC).
Seydou Keïta, considered the "father" of African photography, is a forerunner who begins his portraitist activity in the Bamako of 1948. For economic reasons, the one discovered in the West in the 1990s only realizes one Taken per session and only in the light of day. His images, taken between 1949 and 1962, offer us a glimpse of the high Malian society of the time. And today, the work of Keïta, who died in Paris in 2001, always makes reference, knowing the consecration in the greatest museums of the world.
