You Look Beautiful Like That

Harvard has always prided itself on having a world-class collection of art. From Alexander the Great’s coins to Chinese jades and Durer’s prints, Harvard’s museums presume to showcase the world’s art.

Recently, however, it has become clear that significant parts of that world have been ignored. While the Fogg itself houses mostly European art, the Sackler shows Asian and Islamic art and the Busch-Reisinger shows Eastern and Northern European Art, art of Southern and Latin America is often ignored, as is the art of Africa.

The Fogg, much to the credit of its directors, has recently been seeking to right that balance by offering exhibits that focus on the art of such under-represented cultures. Last spring “Geometric Abstraction: Art of the Patricia Phelps di Cisneros Collection” put the spotlight on artists working in the Americas, and three current exhibitions at the Fogg—including “You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé,” “Marking Places: Spatial Effects of African Art” and “Beyond Decorum: the Photography of Iké Udé”—celebrate African Art.

“You Look Beautiful Like That” showcases the work of two contemporary photographers from Mali, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Both photographers—who have lived and worked in Bamako, the capital of Mali, since the early 1950s—began their work with six by nine cm Kodak Brownie cameras. Soon they each had their own commercial photography studios in Bamako, eventually producing tens of thousands of portraits for members of Bamako’s elite.

“Africans love photography. It is the very emblem of the self. People want to preserve themselves, their faces...” Sidibé said in the Fogg’s exhibition notes. “The camera functions like a mirror in a way; it proves ones existence, or at least a part of one’s existence, and leaves you with a permanent taste.”

One of the remarkable facets of this exhibit is that these photographs are almost entirely African; they are portraits of Africans, by Africans, produced for an African audience. (Although the photographs have been enlarged for international exhibition, they remain inherently African.) The resulting gazes are by turn strikingly honest, proud, playful and ironic.

Keïta’s rectangular portraits offer intimate, insightful glances into their subjects. A 1952-55 photograph, “Untitled,” taken of a middle-aged man wearing dark glasses and a bow-tie depicts an affecting sense of gravity. The dignified, serious gaze of the sitter shows a quiet, restrained pride. Another Keïta portrait, also untitled and taken in 1959, shows a similarly grave young girl, her arms swung casually over a straight-backed chair. The girl’s elaborate white dress and beads provide a stark contrast to her frank, open facial expression.

Sidibé’s portraits tend to be more playful, as shown by “Je voudrais bien voit ma jupe,” (“I would like you to see my skirt”), a portrait that shows a small girl wearing only a new white skirt. And in the 1968 “Amis des espagnoles”, “Friends of the Spanish,” four male teenagers don sombreros, over-sized sunglasses and smirks to create a photograph oozing with campy, self-conscious cool.

One of the strongest points of this exhibition is unfortunately hidden at the back of the show. 14 smaller postcards and photographs from the early twentieth-century—by both European and African photographers—offer a contextualization for Kïeta and Sidibé’s photographs. One of the most striking postcards is internally labeled “Young Arab Woman from Timbuktu,” showing a photograph of two topless women reclining in the pose of an odalisque. The photograph was taken by Francois-Edmund Fortier in 1905, and is quite obviously an example of a European conceit of the exotic. However, both Keïta and Sidibé play with the idea of the odalisque, providing their own (less sexualized) interpretations of the concept in 1959 and 1969, respectively.

Since Sidibé and Keïta are both commercial photographers, the use of props assumes a central role in their works. The props—which range from goats to radios, alarm clocks and scooters—are usually used as signs of affluence and prosperity. Such props have precedent, as umbrellas—usually seen as a symbol of European pragmatism—can be seen in some of the 14 early postcards on display. The most poignant of these images is Sidibé’s 1972 “Les jeunes berges Peuhls,” or “Peuhl Shepherds and a Radio,” where the ancient occupation of shepherding is juxtaposed with the modern technology of a radio.

The poses of these photographs are also important, as the photographers are presented with the challenge of presenting unique personalities within the confines of a studio space. A few portraits show figures seated with hands on their knees, imitating classical poses of African royalty. Other portraits show the subjects posing on stationary scooters, such as Sidibé’s 1962 “Toute la famille en moto,” or “Whole Family on a Motorcycle” and an untitled print from 1959 by Keïta.

While this exhibit does a laudable job in presenting work from African artists, at the end of the exhibit one is still left with a feeling that more is possible. While Keïta and Sidibé’s works are thought-provoking and visually stimulating, they remain the professional portraits of commercial photographers. The question that one is left with is whether there are any artists in Africa that work for purely creative reasons.

The answer, of course, is yes. And in the future, we hope to see their work on the walls of the Fogg as well.

You look beautiful like that:

The portrait photographs of seydou kïeta and malick sidibé

at Fogg Art Museum

September 1 to December 16