Visual art: A little bit of Paradise

An series of understated black and white photographs taken in Mali in the 1940s, and now part of The Paradise series at the Douglas Hyde's Gallery 2, is helping to put Gallery 1's little sister on the map. By Billy LeahySince its inception back in 2001, Gallery 2 has pretty much been the little sister of the main Douglas Hyde space. With the work of acclaimed international and Irish artists gracing the walls of the larger exhibition area in what are often internationally significant solo shows, the concise and self-contained Gallery 2 habitually assumes the role of an interesting adjunct to the DHg. And, while the Paradise series – which has dominated the early calendar for Gallery 2 – is intrinsically fascinating, it never seems to be the main purpose of a visit to the Trinity College exhibition space.
Currently, however, an understated series of portrait photographs taken in Mali during the 1940s and 1950s is providing Katherina Wulff's show in Gallery 1 with a run for its money. What makes the small-scale black and white images in question all the more interesting is that the person who took them – Seydou Keïta – remained a virtual unknown in Europe and the States until just ten years before his death. That was 1991, the year Françoise Huguier, a French photographer working in Bamako, was introduced to the portraitist by Malik Sidibe – himself a locally renowned photographer – who was fixing her camera.
Tracking down Keïta, Huguier found he still had a meticulously arranged archive of negatives stored in a metal box in his humble home in the Malian city. The French photographer immediately spotted how Keïta's images managed to capture and record the whole memory of a long gone era, the whole life of a Bamako in the 1940s and 50s – an African city, which with equal measure of both indigenous and French colonial cultural influences, lay on the cusp of modernity.
Huguier has described how she was moved by the images and how Keïta displayed “an exquisite sense of gesture, a skilful art in posing the models, enhancing the outfits and the accessories.” She has explained her instant allure to the images, detailing how, as a photographer, the most difficult thing when you want to take someone's portrait is how to animate the subject and the ease with which Seydou Keïta manages to carry this off to perfection: “Framing for him is not a concern, he is not a photographer that cuts in reality, he is more a photographer that composes a representation. The light in Seydou Keïta's work is the one of Mali, the very pure light of Sahel. He uses it to emphasise naturally the fleshtones, the garments, the jewels...”
Perhaps the most striking feature of Keïta's work is the interplay between the background (usually a patterned material chosen by him) and the costumes of his subjects. The effect derived by the juxtaposition of the two is outstanding – but one Keïta always claimed was down to chance: “With the 5x7 camera, the first backdrop that I used has been my bed cover. After, I changed them every two/ three years or so. That's how now I can know the dates of the images. Sometimes the background worked really well with the clothes, specially for women's. But it was sheer luck.”
Huguier quickly convinced Keïta to allow her show the photographs in Europe and America, where they were greeted with warm acclaim by the public, collectors and critics alike. The purity of the images, Keïta's self-taught technical brilliance and the historical timing that turned commercial portraits into documents of a critical time in Malian development, ensured he became an overnight success at the age of 71. This, of course, was a full 14 years after he had ceased to take photographs at a time when, in his words, “colour photography took over and machines were doing the work. Many people call themselves photographers nowadays, but they don't know anything.”
Keïta certainly did.