Moderna Museet c/o Enkehuset

Three photographers from West Africa – three generations of photography

14.9 2002 – 6.10 2002

Stockholm

They start from different perspectives and take different paths in their quest for moments of freedom, thoughtlessness, beauty and a heightened sense of life. Together, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso put up an exhibition of photographs spanning half a century. They have had to wait for recognition from a wider audience until recently, and this is the first time that a Swedish audience has the chance to get acquainted with their art.

Seydou Keïta (1923-2001) was one of the pioneers of Malian photography when he opened a studio in Bamako in 1949. Before the 1950’s, studio photography was more or less exclusive to whites in the African cities. Citizens of the young liberated nations saw it as an expression of a newly gained self-confidence to have their portraits taken. In Keïta’s works, the customer and his vane desires were king. Elegant clothes, classic poses and status-filled accessories characterize Keïta’s photographs, taken in a traditional studio environment and displaying an elevated sense of tranquillity.

Even though he also had been working in his own studio from 1962, Malick Sidibé (Mali, 1936) was more interested in getting out of it to capture the spirit of the new age out on the street, where the optimism of the young generation being raised in a free country was mixing with the strong interest in fashion and popular music found globally in the young communities. Sidibé’s photographs are a testament to a few years when Africans thought everything was possible. There is movement in the pictures, and the persons caught by the lens, mostly young people, ooze with a kind of coolness closely related to the one you see in works by famous Western photographers such as David Bailey or Irving Penn.

At the tender age of 13, Samuel Fosso (Cameroon, 1962) started working as an apprentice in a studio, and only a few years later he opened up on his own. He dedicated himself to taking self-portraits as early as at age 16. At the outset, the portraits seem to serve as an almost coquettish way to explore the self-identity, but eventually the body is used as raw material for a deeper exploration of the vulnerability of the human race: painful, exposed and ambiguous.

Svenska Institutet (The Swedish Institute) is a co-partner with Moderna Museet in the project.

Curator: Magnus af Petersens