Photography

MoMA Positions Seydou Keïta's Studio Portraits as Pan-African Political Documents

MoMA's latest exhibition argues Seydou Keïta's 1950s Bamako portraits weren't just documentation—they were active instruments of Pan-African political imagination during the decolonial era.

Art

James Barnor At MoMA: Photography As Pan-African Infrastructure

MoMA pairs James Barnor's Ever Young Studio portraits with Kwame Brathwaite's 'Black is Beautiful' photography to reveal a transatlantic visual language that actively constructed Pan-African consciousness—not merely documented it.

MoMA

MoMA's Ideas of Africa Examines Portraiture as Political Strategy

MoMA pairs mid-century Bamako and Kinshasa studio photographers — Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara — with contemporary diasporic artists to argue that portraiture was always a political project, not a documentary one.