He's the catalyst to give a voice to the people.
My name is Mickalene Thomas. I'm a painter, photographer, and filmmaker.
I wasn't trained as a photographer, but it was always a resource for my paintings. And so I'm always looking at Seydou Keïta and thinking, "how did he do that?"
I loved his work when I first saw it, because it was everything you would not see in photography.
I studied as an abstract painter, and I was really excited about how these different fabrics collided, but they made sense. They created chaos, but then this quiet moment with the figure. The resting spot is her face, is her skin. You are looking at her, the softness of her lips. That pausing moment brings you to the gaze of her eyes and holds you there.
He has a great awareness of the grayscale. Black can flatten out. If you look at this gentleman, some of the blacks in the jacket fall apart, but it becomes this beautiful form. Even though it's black and white, you can feel all the color in the image. The black of the skin, the black of fabric: those are different things, because there's variation of the blackness of the skin. This woman compared to this woman, the color difference is far and between. Our skin has so much life to it, this glistening light and energy that fabric does not have.
He breaks the mold. He's using a photo studio, but also working within a language that he's from, culturally, using what's around him. There's this sense of ownership and awareness. You don't have a photojournalist coming and telling your story to the world. You're claiming that space yourself. Some of these feel like a great collaboration between the sitter and the artist.
I like the ones where you can tell that it's a photo studio. He used props and costume to create an elegance. Like, with these four individuals, there's a cloth hung. They're obviously outside. Maybe they were on their way to a function or maybe he dressed them to create a moment that is not necessarily real, but we can believe these moments.
As an artist, what you make is an extension of yourself. It comes from your experiences and how you see the world. This is a lot of him. It's things that he loved, the smell, the cloth. It's the people he grew up with.
It's so powerful because he's connected to it. He's the catalyst to give a voice to the people. We see ourselves when other people see us. These photographs are validating the moment that these people were here.
