Art + Auction ran a cover profile of Jean Pigozzi who remains one of the world’s most interesting figures. If nothing else, the story allows a brief retelling of the Seydou Keita story:
In 1991 he encountered two uncredited photographs from Bamako, Mali, in “Africa Explores,” an exhibition curated bySusan Vogel at the New York Center for African Art. Excited by the Irving Penn-like grace of the black-and-white studio portraits, Pigozzi faxed the images from the catalogue to Magnin in Paris and asked him to find the photographer. After three or four days searching, Magnin located an old man seated on a huge metal trunk in a tiny storefront in Bamako. It was Seydou Keïta, and the trunk contained approximately 6,000 of his negatives, dating back to the late 1940s. For decades, Keïta’s portrait business was based on clients renting costumes and props, both Western and African, for formal shots. According to Pigozzi, Magnin persuaded Keïta to release a hundred or so negatives (the New York Times reported a significantly higher figure in an article by Michael Rips published in January 2006). He took them back to Paris, “where we cleaned them up and made some beautiful prints,” Pigozzi says. […]
But after Keïta’s death in Paris, in 2001, a nasty and lengthy legal dispute erupted between his heirs and Pigozzi and Magnin over possession of the photographer’s negatives and charges of fake signatures on the prints. Defending his actions, Pigozzi told Rips in 2006 that without his efforts, Keïta “would be totally forgotten.” Today he remains steadfast in that claim: “I am incredibly proud that I made this immense talent the most important photographer in Africa. I think he’s on the same level as Irving Penn or Avedon.”
The Unstoppable Jean Pigozzi: Inside the World of an Art-Collecting Juggernaut (Artinfo)
