Seydou Keïta operated a portrait studio in Bamako, Mali, from 1948 to 1977, photographing residents who came to be documented for identity cards, family records, or personal commemoration. Working with artificial lighting, a twin-lens reflex camera, and patterned fabric backdrops, he made formal portraits that his subjects used to project their own aspirations and identities. His work was largely unknown outside Mali until it was shown at the 1994 Bamako Encounters festival.
Kodak
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Introduced by Eastman Kodak in February 1900 at a price of one dollar, making snapshot photography accessible to the general public for the first time. The original was a simple cardboard box camera with a single convex-concave lens taking 2 1/4-inch square pictures on roll film. Over its 86-year production run (1900 to 1986), Kodak released 125 different Brownie models across multiple film formats.
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