Three Girls in Matching Dresses

Seydou Keïta

1975 · Gelatin silver print · Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

The two different sizes of prints of photographs by Seydou Keïta displayed in this exhibition illustrate the various stages in the history and reception of his images. During his career as a portrait photographer in Mali, Keïta mostly made postcard-format images, like this smaller print. As Keïta’s photographs entered major international collections in the 1990s, his negatives were often reprinted in larger sizes, like the ones seen at left. Keïta approved of the new prints, because they allowed him to see his work in a scale he would not have been able to produce with his own equipment. Nonetheless, through this process of enlargement, the relation between object, author, and viewer changes dramatically.

Artist

Seydou Keïta

Date

1975

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

Credit line

Gift of Susan Mullin Vogel, 2015