The fate of his images has provoked feuds and threats, and above all, a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity. By MICHAEL RIPS. [NYT > Arts]
The story of this discrepancy – how a pocket-size print, sold for a few dollars in a neighborhood shop in West Africa, became a wall-size photograph that sold for $16,000 in an upscale SoHo gallery – begins in colonial Mali in the 1930’s and continues into the future: a new show of Mr. Keïta’s work opens at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea on Friday.
It is a story that includes screaming fights, a lawsuit and charges of theft, forgery and perjury. It survives the photographer himself, who died in 2001. And it touches on the broadest channels of human history, from colonialism to capitalism to revolution to race. But it also involves a conflict of the most rarefied sort – a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity.
From SFGate: Jack London’s lens on 1906 quake – Author’s photos, never seen by public, get centennial show
It is still magic after all these years: Slowly the black and white image comes to life in the darkroom tray at the headquarters of the California Historical Society in San Francisco. The picture is from another time, but it is sharp and clear — it is of a huge domed building, all in ruins, as if it had been bombed.
It is the wreckage of San Francisco’s City Hall, destroyed in an earthquake a century ago this spring. It is a remarkable picture, but the photographer was even more remarkable. He was Jack London.
