In the 1930's, Seydou Keïta, who was then young, uneducated and working in his father's carpentry shop, received a Brownie camera (producing a 6-by-9-centimeter negative) from his uncle. In 1948, Mr. Keïta (pronounced kay-EE-tah) set up a commercial studio in downtown Bamako, across from the city's prison and down the street from the train station. He was poor, so he made prints, using a 5-by-7-inch view camera, by placing the negative directly against the photographic paper, used his bed sheet as a backdrop, and photographed outdoors using available light.
Despite this, his portraits were a success.
Unlike his predecessors, who had photographed Africans to encourage missionary work or justify colonization, or as erotica, Mr. Keïta made photographs of Africans for their own personal use, and he revealed them as they had not been seen before: wearing Western suits and bow ties (his own), sitting on motorbikes or holding radios, or cradling a single flower, a reference to the Symbolists taught in Mali's French schools. For the others, it was a mixture of Western dress and African poses, African dress and Western poses - people defining themselves at the uneven edge of modernity.
Okwui Enwezor, a scholar of photography and curator of a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that included Mr. Keïta's work, maintained that in the amount of information he conveys about his middle-class subjects, in the controlled complexity of the portraits and the high level of quality maintained over a great volume, his work is "comparable to the portraiture of Rembrandt." What makes this all the more astounding, he added, is that Mr. Keïta was "working outside any aesthetic discourse" - that is, he was uneducated in the history of art and photography. Mr. Keïta claimed that when he set up his studio, there were only four other studio photographers in Mali.
Following that nation's independence in 1960, he was told to close his studio and work for the government. When he resisted, he once recounted, a general visited his studio. Mr. Keïta closed up shop, locking his roughly 7,000 negatives in a tin and burying them in his yard.
Fifteen years later, near the day when he retired from government, someone broke into his studio and stole his photography equipment. To support himself, he began to fix mopeds, converting his studio into a repair shop.
It was there, in 1990, that he met Françoise Huguier, a French photojournalist. Ms. Huguier arranged for a small number of Mr. Keïta's photographs to be exhibited outside of Africa, where they came to the attention of Jean Pigozzi, heir to the Simca car fortune and one of the world's pre-eminent collectors of contemporary African art. In 1992 Mr. Pigozzi sent André Magnin, the curator of Mr. Pigozzi's African collection, to Bamako to find the photographer, and Mr. Magnin returned with 921 negatives.
He made prints from those negatives, which appeared a couple of years later at an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and then in 1997 at a solo show at the Scalo Gallery in Zurich, accompanied by a book called "Seydou Keïta: An African Photographer." Walter Keller, curator of the Scalo show and editor of the book, said the prints at both those shows were 20 by 24 inches - bigger than the originals (5 by 7 inches) but not yet enormous. By the time the new prints reached the Gagosian exhibition four months later, some had grown to 48 by 60 inches.
Mr. Magnin sold the prints he made to Mr. Pigozzi and to other collectors, galleries and museums. Mr. Enwezor credits him with bringing Mr. Keïta to the attention of the world.
Mr. Keïta, however, was not pleased. Jean-Marc Patras, a well-known agent for African artists and musicians, said that Mr. Keïta believed that Mr. Magnin was making unauthorized prints and signing them. "I absolutely deny these accusations," Mr. Magnin said. "Seydou Keïta was involved in every decision, was aware of every print made, and signed every print that has his signature. We were also very careful about giving him an accounting of the money that we received for the prints."
Mr. Pigozzi said on Tuesday that without André Magnin's and his efforts, Mr. Keïta "would have been totally forgotten." They published an important book, he continued, and got his work into the collections of major museums. "Also with our help, Keïta was able to finally make a lot of money by selling his prints in a very orderly way," Mr. Pigozzi said, adding that Mr. Patras, however, had managed to make a mess of things.
At the time of the Gagosian show, Mr. Keïta met with Sean Kelly of the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. "Keïta," he said, "was not pleased with what Pigozzi and Magnin were doing with his photographs, which is why Keïta approached me." But it wasn't until 2001 that the photographer severed his ties with them.
A relative of Mr. Keïta, Kader Keïta, a former diplomat who was present for a meeting between Mr. Keïta and Mr. Magnin, said: "Seydou was furious about the possibility that Magnin was forging Seydou's signature. Seydou also wanted the negatives back." He assigned the exclusive rights to sell his photographs to Mr. Patras. The negatives were not returned. Mr. Patras went to work on an exhibition of Mr. Keïta's photographs at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Weeks before the exhibition was scheduled to open in 2001, Mr. Keïta flew to Paris to confront Mr. Magnin, Mr. Patras says. But within days of his arrival, Mr. Keïta was dead at around 80.
Two weeks later, Mr. Keïta's work went up at Sean Kelly. Just before the opening, Mr. Kelly says, Mr. Pigozzi, a large man, charged through the gallery. "What do you think you're doing!," Mr. Kelly recalls him shouting, albeit it in more pungent language. "I own Seydou Keïta."
After bringing in a third party to witness the outburst, Mr. Kelly, a large-chested former rugby player, who said he "was not about to be intimidated by Pigozzi," threw him out.
A month earlier, Mr. Patras and others had set up the Association Seydou Keïta in Bamako to preserve the negatives that were still in Mr. Keïta's possession and to oversee and approve the printing of all future photographs. Mr. Keïta and the association, working with Mr. Kelly, decided that all new prints would be made in limited editions, with no edition greater than 15 and some as small as 3. These prints, certified by the association, are the basis for the new show.
As for the 921 other negatives, Mr. Magnin says they are no longer in his possession. He said he gave the negatives to Lancina Keïta, one of Mr. Keïta's brothers, at the photographer's funeral. Lancina Keïta has refused to coment.
In July 2004, the association filed a lawsuit in Paris against Mr. Pigozzi and Mr. Magnin. That litigation is in the discovery phase. Julie Jacob, the French lawyer who is representing the association, contends that "Magnin and Pigozzi are causing the negatives to be moved between individuals, some of whom are members of Keïta's family, so as to avoid having to turn them over to the association." Mr. Kelly said he feared that the negatives might be lost altogether.
The controversy presents a difficulty for those who buy and sell prints made from Mr. Keïta's negatives. Barbara Wilhelm at the Gagosian Gallery said that "because it is difficult to tell which of Keïta's prints were signed by Keïta or signed by someone else with or without Keïta's authorization, each print must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis."
"From the fact that Keïta attended the show at Gagosian and voiced no complaints about the prints," she said, she is "satisfied that the signatures on the prints that were exhibited that evening were legitimate."