Portrait of a Lady
A
photographer working in a commercial studio in West Africa in the 20th
century had a straightforward task: to please his clients. In that
sense, the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta was — like his father, who
worked as a blacksmith, carpenter, mechanic and electrician, among other
jobs — a craftsman. He was paid by the public to make pictures. But
like his esteemed Malian compatriot Malick Sidibé, Mama Casset of
Senegal and Joseph Moise Agbodjelou of Benin, he produced such fine work
that we now consider him a great African artist. These master
photographers gave us panoramas of life in Bamako, Dakar and Porto-Novo,
a vivid record of individual people, largely shorn of their names and
stories but irrepressibly alive. Here are good clothes gracefully cut,
glowing skin, beautifully coifed hair, polished shoes: all the familiar
markers of a person taking pride in his or her appearance. Here’s
someone who looks witty, here’s another who looks querulous, another
who’s modest, or vain, or sweet. There we see a renegade bra strap
slipping off a shoulder, there a large laughing man with a baby, a woman
in a bathing suit, youths partying at night with their Afros,
bell-bottoms, precious LPs and endless reserves of cool.
These
photographs are ripostes to the anthropological images of ‘‘natives’’
made by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those
photographs, in which the subjects had no say in how they were seen, did
much to shape the Western world’s idea of Africans. Something changed
when Africans began to take photographs of one another: You can see it
in the way they look at the camera, in the poses, the attitude. The
difference between the images taken by colonialists or white adventurers
and those made for the sitter’s personal use is especially striking in
photographs of women. In the former, women are being looked at against
their will, captive to a controlling gaze. In the latter, they look at
themselves as in a mirror, an activity that always involves seriousness,
levity and an element of wonder.
A
portrait of this kind is a visual soliloquy. Consider, for instance,
one of Keïta’s most famous pictures, now called the Odalisque. A woman
reclines in a long dress with fine floral patterning on a bed with a
checked bedspread. Her head scarf is polka-dotted. The bed is placed in
front of a wall, which is draped with a paisley cloth. And even her face
is marked with cicatrices. Then we notice, emerging from this swirling
field — a profusion of pattern that brings to mind Matisse at his most
inventive — her delicate hands and feet, dark but subtly shaded; the
right arm on which she rests her head; her narrowed eyes. Her look is
self-possessed rather than seductive. She’s looking ahead but not at the
camera. It is the look of someone who is thinking about herself,
simultaneously outward and inward. The image challenges and delights the
viewer with its complicated two-dimensional game.
Keïta’s
and Sidibé’s oeuvres make me think of August Sander’s record of German
people in their various occupations in the years between the World Wars,
or of Mike Disfarmer’s thousands of portraits taken in Heber Springs,
Ark.: faces peering out of the past, unknown to us but as expressive and
intense as those we love. Keïta was not directly influenced by these
photographers, nor by any of the conventions of photography in the West.
In an interview he gave the French gallerist André Magnin in the
mid-’90s, he said: ‘‘I’ve heard that in your country you have old
photographs that are like mine. Well, I’ve never met any foreign
photographers, nor seen their photos.’’ By his own account, he was an
original. Looking at the body of his work, we become conscious of
implied community, customs and connections, a world that is perhaps now
irretrievable.
Malick
Sidibé — the younger of these two photographers — made many fine
portraits as well, generally working with hipper, less formal poses than
Keïta did and shooting more often at night and at parties. There’s one
portrait of Sidibé’s in particular that I’m always drawn to. A woman
stands alone in a sleeveless blouse and an ankle-length skirt. She has
sandals on her feet, a pendulous earring in each ear and hair woven
close to her scalp. Her address to the camera is direct. No, she’s not
quite alone: A man’s shoulder and arm are visible just to her left. We
also see his right shoe and half of his right leg. But the rest of him
has been dodged away in the printing of the picture.
On
the brown paper border that frames the photograph are written the
words: “Je veux être seule. 1979 — Malick Sidibé.” On the right border
are Sidibé’s signature and the date 2009. I suppose Sidibé signed this
photograph in 2009 and wrote down what the woman told him 30 years
earlier, before he had printed the photograph: “Je veux être seule” (‘‘I
want to be alone’’). This young woman, like many others in Sidibé’s
work, has decided her own image. The photo’s peculiarity is the mark of
her authority.
I
love the West African women in the photographs by Keïta and Sidibé,
some of whom are of my mother’s generation and the generation just
before, women to whom a university education was widely available, and
for whom working outside the home was a given. In West African
photography of this period, there are many photographs of friendship
among women, many photographs of women with their families, many of
young women with their young men. And there are photos of women alone,
some of whom perhaps might also have told the photographer, “Je veux
être seule.”
CreditSeydou Keïta/SKPEAC via C.A.A.C. — the Pigozzi Collection
The
confidence visible in photographs like Keïta’s and Sidibé’s can be
evoked even when we don’t see the sitters’ faces. J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere,
who was born in Nigeria in 1930 and did most of his work there,
understood the expressive possibilities of women’s heads, particularly
those crowned with the marvelous array of hairstyles common to many
Nigerian ethnic groups. These photographs, made in the years following
the country’s independence from Britain in 1960, record evanescent
sculptures that are both performance art and temporary body
modification. Most of these heads are turned away from us. Has the back
of a head ever been more evocative than in these photographs? Ojeikere
made hundreds of them, and each head seems to convey an attitude, and
even a glance. On the streets of Lagos today, such heads, necks,
hairstyles and elaborately constructed and tied head wraps can still be
seen, tableaux vivants of assertive elegance.
Photographs
by Keïta, Sidibé, Agbodjelou and Ojeikere are united by the period in
which they were made as well as by geographical and cultural proximity
to one another. There seems to me a correspondence between the energy of
these pictures and the optimism and determination of the West African
independence movements of the ’50s and ’60s. The photographs’ legacies
have had a powerful effect on 21st-century African portraiture, but the
contemporary work that most reminds me of them is from farther away on
the continent, and made in very different circumstances. Zanele Muholi,
one of the most prominent contemporary African photographers, who
started working only a few years after the end of apartheid in South
Africa in 1994, is in a sense a ‘‘postindependence’’ artist. She has
tried to document a specific aspect of the country’s new political,
social and economic terrain. One of Muholi’s long-term projects, called
‘‘Faces and Phases,’’ focuses on the portraiture of black lesbian and
transgender people, most of them in South Africa. Like her West African
forebears, she shows people as they wish to be seen.
South
Africa is one of the few countries whose constitution protects its
citizens from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But
persistent prejudice remains a reality for many black South African
lesbians and transgender people, many of whom have been raped and even
murdered. Muholi’s work is an answer to those who want to wish them away
or intimidate them into invisibility. To look at their faces, in
portrait after portrait, is to become newly aware of the power of
portraiture in a gifted artist’s hands. Muholi doesn’t grant her sitters
independence — they are independent — but she makes their independence
visible. ‘‘Faces and Phases,’’ currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum
as part of a show of Muholi’s work, is a complete world.
The
work of Keïta and Sidibé, too, makes us aware of an entire world of
experiences, one in which men are sometimes secondary. Keïta did well
enough from his photo studio that, in the early 1950s, he was able to
buy a Peugeot 203. Here is that car, used as a background prop for a
group portrait made around 1956, featuring two women and a girl. The
women’s dark foreheads and cheekbones are echoed in the Peugeot’s
sinuous lines. And way off to the right, touching the hood of the car,
is a man’s hand. He has been sidelined, just as the man in “Je veux être
seule” was. But a closer look reveals another man in the picture. He
can be seen in the front wheel well of the car, in the glimmer of its
reflective shine. This second man, dressed in white, is stooped over
something. He is the photographer, Seydou Keïta himself, in his limited
role, collaborating with the true authors of the image: the women.
No comments:
Post a Comment