Photographic Props / The Photographer as Prop: The Many Faces of Jacques Tousselle

Abstract

The paper explores the way in which a Cameroonian studio photographer, Jacques Touselle, used props and how he chose to present himself in the course of a forty year career as the first indigenous photographer from Mbouda, a town in Cameroon’s West Region (former West Province). As well as providing photographs for routine administrative purposes such as ID cards, the studio photographers took many different ‘photos de plaisir’: images for fun. Looking through the archive of some forty thousand images, we find several of the photographer himself in a variety of different guises. Is he chameleon, flaneur, or someone with a wry sense of humour? Perhaps such questions cannot be answered in the content of academic discussion but this inability does point to the limits of those discussions. Contrasts between the images in his personal photo album and his appearance in images in the main archive of his work will be examined, revealing how he chose to print some negatives and how he collaborated with clients to make images which told a tale.

Keywords:

• Jacques Tousselle
• Photography
• Cameroon
• Mbouda
• Portraiture

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to: Tousselle Jacques and his helpers in Mbouda, The British Library, Endangered Archives Programme (EAP054), especially Lynda Barraclough and Cathy Collins, The British Council, Yaoundé, Adonis Millol, AAREF, Yaoundé.

I have also benefited from a collaboration with the following colleagues who have used face‐matching algorithms to identify some of the images of Tousselle Jacques contained within the main archive of 46,000 images: Ananth Garre, and Professor C. V. Jawahar, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India, and Professor Andrew Zisserman, Department of Engineering Science, Oxford University.

Notes

[1] More information about the archiving project may be found in Zeitlyn 2009a, 2009b, 2010 and forthcoming 2011. The social context of photography in Mbouda is described in McKeown 2007, 2010. Copies of the complete archive have been deposited with the British Library and Autograph APB in UK. In Cameroon copies have been left with the National Archives, Yaoundé, The British Council, Yaoundé, and the Universities of Yaoundé 1, Dschang and Ngaoundéré.

[2] The full sequence of official implementation is as follows: 14 Jan 1947 ID Cards were required in some urban areas but photographs were optional (Arrêté du Haut Commissaire de France au Cameroun 2521, 3/9/1946, 46/1946, 46/1078 in Journal Officiel du Cameroun Français pp. 1078–9). From 24 Sep 1953 ID cards with compulsory photographs were required throughout French Cameroun. This was implemented over the entire country in the period 1954–7 (Order 599 of 24 Sep 1953, 53/1688, JOCF pp 1168). Finally, on 29 Sept 1964, a National ID Card with photograph was required in the Federal republic (Decree No. 64‐DF‐394 of 29 Sept 1964 Official Gazette of the Federal Republic of Cameroon 1041–2). Mbouda was in French Cameroun. (My thanks are due to Ferdinand Taneken Kanno for help in compiling this information).

[3] Boyer Photax III ‘Blindé’, produced 1938–1946 M.I.O.M., Vitry‐sur‐Seine, France http://www.thecamerasite.net/05_Box_Cameras/Pages/bakeliittikamerat.htm