Fashion, photography and affective memory in Seydou Keïta (1948-1962)

Abstract

This work is based on photographs of Seydou Keïta produced between 1948 and 1962 (second stage of his photos, after the initial period of 1935-1948) in a photographic study in Bamako, Mali. Faced with a lens loaded with affections, the photographic dynamics is part of a kind of aesthetic and social game that opens up compositional aspects (framing, distance, background, pose, gesture) and ethnographic aspects in a refined work of reframing colonial and fashion influences western and African staged in the studio portraits. The ‘fascination with the modern’ and ancestral dignity emerge in aesthetic ‘fusions’ in a refined gesture of photographic organization that delimit the social image between the ‘creative reappropriation’ of European styles and the reenergization of African dress traditions. The series of photographs chosen here embraces the compositional characteristic of Keïta’s portraits, establishing an active correspondence in the transmission of genealogies, in the multiplicity of cultural references, and in the staging of fashion as an aspect of discursive narrativization of the personal ethnicity.