Seydou Keïta was born in Bamako, Mali in 1921, then part of the colony of French Sudan and a bustling transportation hub on the route to Dakar. With a Kodak Brownie given to him by his uncle, Keïta took up photography at the age of fourteen, going on to establish what would become Bamako’s most successful portraiture enterprise of the 1950s and 60s. Seydou Keïta’s work made its first international appearance in 1991 and has been exhibited extensively across Europe, Japan and the United States.