Private Lives in a Century of Change

Images of Africa tend to come to us clouded by disaster--war, famine, pestilence and, most recently, destructive rivers of lava in Congo.

But another set of photographs provides a counterpoint to such grim realities. “You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe,” opening at the UCLA Hammer Museum on Saturday, documents an Africa of proud families and nattily dressed young men, of changing times and changing styles, of life enjoyed rather than life endured.

“I’m mainly interested in capturing joyful moments, joy and pleasure,” Sidibe told the show’s curator, Michelle Lamuniere, in an interview conducted November 2000. “I also like the idea of photography as a means of creating memories.... People wanted these images of themselves. It’s a powerful urge that they can’t always explain or resist.”

Sidibe and Keita each ran their own portrait studios in Bamako, capital of the West African country of Mali. Keita, who died in November, started his business in the 1940s when Mali was still a French colony. Sidibe opened up shop in the 1960s, a generation later, as Mali became an independent state. Although both were commercial photographers first, plying their craft on command, they also captured the aspirations of a rising nation.

In one Keita portrait from the early 1950s, a man is elegantly dressed in a stiff white shirt and dark jacket, a jaunty bowtie at his neck and a dapper kerchief in his breast pocket. He stares out of fashionable horn-rimmed glasses, while his face shows the signs of traditional scarification. “This attraction to Western fashion does not reflect a longing to be Western, however,” according to Lamuniere, assistant curator of photography at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, where the show originated, “but rather a wish to be associated with contemporary trends and fashions.”

Of the 72 black-and-white images in the show, 44 are enlargements made from the original negatives. Fourteen are vintage prints by Sidibe--who proudly did his own darkroom work--in their original postcard-sized format. The remaining 14, included to provide historical context, are postcards and photographs taken throughout West Africa by mostly European photographers at the turn of the previous century.

Lamuniere points out the contrasts between the work of Sidibe and Keita, and the earlier shots, noting the stiff poses in the pictures and the captions on the postcards.

“When you add text to the portrait it tends to depersonalize it,” she points out. “Keita and Sidibe’s portraits were intended for private use and have the potency of an intimate experience.”

Keita was born around 1921, Sidibe in 1935. Although there are parallels in much of their work, their photographs also show the social and economic changes Mali went through in the latter half of the century.

The way each became a photographer tells part of the story. Keita got his start as a photographer when an uncle gave him a Kodak Brownie camera. He was a furniture maker who taught himself to take pictures on the side.

Sidibe’s training was more formal. He moved to Bamako to study jewelry making at the School for Sudanese Craftsmen, now the National Institute for Art, but after he graduated in 1955, he took a job with French commercial photographer Gerard Guillat, learning via apprenticeship.

Keita set up his studio in the courtyard of his house, hung up a bedsheet as backdrop and relied on available light, which accounts for some of the high contrast and shadows in his pictures. Sidibe opened his studio--with studio lighting--in a room so small that a corner of the wall often appears in his pictures. “It’s amazing what he was able to do in that space,” says Lamuniere, who has visited there.

Both photographers were so popular that during holidays--when many would get new outfits--lines of people waited to have their picture taken. Each has taken upward of 10,000 portraits.

“Generally, women come to get photographed as soon as they have a new hairdo or purchase a trendy piece of jewelry: a bracelet, a necklace, a handbag,” Sidibe told The Times. “For men, it’s when they buy a new bicycle or motorcycle.”

For one 1962 photo, a man brought a sheep to Sidibe’s studio; for a 1974 photo, a tailor brought in a dress form decked out in a gown he had made.

If what the clients owned was not fine enough, the photographers gladly provided costumes and props: a snazzy European suit, an elegant wristwatch, or perhaps even a radio or motorcycle to convey an image of modernity and affluence. The show’s title is taken from a phrase popular in Bambara, the language common in Mali, I ka nye tan--presumably the reaction the sitter hoped for: “You look beautiful like that.”

Each photographer also took plenty of family memento pictures. “In Africa, photography is a way of recognizing the different stages of your life,” Sidibe says. “Photographs are memories that allow you to follow the growth of your children.”

The photos pick up changes in fashion and style and cultural mores. In one Sidibe shot from 1969, a woman chooses to get her picture taken in a bathing suit. When Keita was working, such a photograph would have been unthinkable.

There are also shifts in the expression and pose of the sitters. “Keita was one of the first African portrait photographers in Mali,” Lamuniere says, “so you see in [his] portraits greater formality. [At the time] photography was a novelty, it was an event, so the sitters took the portrait-making session with more seriousness, less gaiety than Sidibe’s sitters. By the time Sidibe was working, photography was more ubiquitous, and you see his sitters taking a more active role in how they wanted to define themselves.”

Keita closed his portrait studio in 1962, when he took a photography-related job dealing with IDs for the newly formed government. Sidibe, now in his late 60s, is still in business, although it’s more a part-time occupation now. In the last decade, the work of both has been “discovered,” resulting in exhibitions, magazine assignments and a coffee-table book on each by Andre Magnin, curator for the Contemporary African Art Collection, housed in Geneva and founded by venture capitalist Jean Pigozzi, a Harvard alumnus. (Most of the photographs in “You Look Beautiful” are from this collection.)

In the U.S., Keita’s work has been featured in shows at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian in 1996 and, in recent weeks at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. Sidibe had an exhibition of shots from social events, a sideline to his portrait work, at Deitch Projects in New York in 1999.

Lamuniere’s show is the first to add an academic imprimatur to the material. “We were interested in bringing work of these two photographers to a broader audience and doing something a little more scholarly,” she says, “looking at their work for formal qualities and building a social context from which they came.”

Reaction to the show in Boston and to the gallery exhibition in New York has been favorable. “Keita was predisposed to strong statements,” wrote Vicki Goldberg in the New York Times. “No one in his portraits melts into the background.” Joanne Silver, writing in the Boston Herald, noted that Sidibe’s photos “radiate the warmth of

While their photographs are treated as art overseas, their work isn’t prized the way it used to be at home. “Color photography has really taken over,” Lamuniere says, “so I think it has simplified the traditions of portrait photography. Now, with all the technological advances in photography, it’s more of a snapshot mentality.”

Keita and Sidibe have made it clear that, at least at first, they weren’t trying to be artists, they were just trying to please customers.

“Frankly, we work in order to earn our daily bread here,” Keita told Lamuniere. “Photography started out as a means to an end for me. I never thought that there would be exhibitions.”

Sidibe echoed the thought: “[F]or an African photographer, getting paid is the name of the game. We don’t just pick up a camera for the pure pleasure of it, you know--by and large, our work stems from an economic need.”

Over time, he admitted, his attitude changed. “But that first taste turned into a genuine hunger,” he says, “and a real passion for the art of photography was born.”

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“YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL LIKE THAT,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Dates: Saturday through May 19. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, and Fridays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Prices: $4.50, general; $3, seniors; free for members and students. Phone: (310) 443-7000. Special events: Talks by Michelle Lamuniere on Feb. 24 at 3 p.m. and Malick Sidibe on Feb. 27 at 7 p.m.

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Scarlet Cheng is a frequent contributor to Sunday Calendar.