Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s-1990s

Abstract

Photo Cameroon plunged visitors into superimposed, disparate worlds: the studios of twentieth century Cameroonian photographers and a museum installation where COVID-19 dictated the design. Even the photographers on view—Jacques Toussele (1939-2017), Joseph Chila (b. 1948), and Samuel Finlak (b. 1958)—communicated three different atmospheres and styles.Toussele, the eldest and best-known in the West, expressed an urban, adventurous style. A buzz of activity surrounded his studio, Photo Jacques, which operated in the town of Mbouda from 1959 to 2006. The museum images often suggested this playful hustle-and-bustle. In one emblematic image, two young men wear bell-bottom trousers, sport-shirts, and athletic shoes. Each, prominently displaying a bottle of Sprite, turns away from the other. One looks up, the other down. Behind them, three layers of Toussele's popular backgrounds are stacked helter-skelter, signaling a wacky lark of a photo session (Fig. 1).Toussele's nephew and apprentice, Joseph Chila, established his more sober studio, Photo Joseph, in the small town of Mayo Darlé. Working indoors or out, he used a hand-painted cloth background and artificial light. Samuel Finlak worked outdoors with natural light. An itinerant photographer around his village of Atta, he transformed village walls, houses, doorways, and landscapes into picturesque settings (Fig. 2).The three men could thrive as popular studio photographers by seizing the opportunity to do identity photos required by the government. Because the French colonial government and after 1960, the Cameroonian National government, funded the ID photos until 1998, Cameroonian photographers could offer elaborate studio portraits at a cost accessible to a wide swath of the urban and rural population. For more than three decades, the photographers produced, and archived, thousands of negatives. From these, Erica P. Jones, Fowler Curator of African Arts, and co-curator David Zeitlyn took the task of choosing 110 images.These images showed Toussele, Chila, and Finlak imposing their own creative vision on the conventions of West African studio photography. The genre gained wide popularity in West Africa during the 1940s, when photographers like Mama Casset in Senegal, Seydou Keïta in Mali, and Francis K. Honny in Ghana opened studios and established the conventions that spread across the region. Sitters posed in front of fantastical painted walls or cloth hangings. They adopted poses to express dignity, affection, or playfulness. They wore a variety of outfits from time-honored local tunics to fashion-forward miniskirts. They used props that signified economic and social status, whether real or desired.Toussele, Chila, and Finlak twisted these conventions to suit their imagination. The co-curators brought into focus each photographer's vision by organizing the gallery into six conceptual zones: The Photographer's Work; Photographic Collaborations; Revealing Identities; Personal and Public Affiliation; Levity in the Studio; and Preserving the Archive. These themes were not fixed categories since the title of each section illuminated most of the photos in the other sections. Visitors could thus delve into each photo through the layers of all six concepts.For instance, the themes of the photographer's work, his collaboration with sitters, their identities and affiliation, as well as the studio atmosphere were all visible in a remarkable Toussele photo. Itinerant artist Lucky Sparrow had painted the fanciful background with an ornate column, a tree, and a pot of flowers. At the bottom, a crouching lion provided the perfect accompaniment for a couple who chose to recline on the floor in a romantic embrace (Fig. 3).Toussele also supplied props. His motorcycle, a common prop in West African portrait photography, was a favorite. A more unusual choice was a plastic tree of the artificial Christmas tree variety. Youngsters could pose with the tree between them (Fig. 4).Although Chila and Finlak did not supply props, they did collaborate with clients to set a lavish scene. Chila, in the predominantly Muslim town of Mayo Darlé, used a background painted with fantasy outlines of vaguely mosque-like buildings. It had a three-dimensional perspective and was so extensive that Chila could pose groups in a section of the canvas. One group photo bends several conventions of West African studio photography (Fig. 5). Four women, two of whom hold up a piece of paper, appear casually dressed in t-shirts or a skimpy camisole. Two of them smile, while one appears to be talking and the fourth looks serious. As a group, they defy the portrait customs according to which women wear their best newest fashions and groups carefully coordinate their facial expressions. The women create a spontaneous feeling, unusual in portrait photography, as if they had just been passing by, and casually stopped for an impromptu shoot.Samuel Finlak could also put an unusual twist on the photographic conventions. One ubiquitous prop across West Africa was the boom box. In one Finlak photo, however, the boom box drew surprised “oohs” and “aahs” from visitors. An adorable toddler, very dressed up and looking very serious, stood behind a boom box that reached to his waist. Beside it, a thermos, accompanied by two cans of prepackaged food, reached even higher. The thermos and boom box looked like giant fantasy theater props rather than quotidian household items (Fig. 6). The two cans also raised the question of what they meant. Did the family see these cans as symbolic? If so, what did they symbolize?The narrative text that accompanied the section titles addressed more generally this question of what American viewers could and could not know about the people in the photos. Although the title “Revealing Identities” suggested transparent knowledge, the accompanying narrative addressed the ambiguities. Fashions, props, poses, and facial expressions could conceal more than they revealed about the sitters’ inner and outer life. The narrative panels reminded visitors that the photography studio was a place to fantasize identities.One strength of Photo Cameroon was the play between section titles and adjoining text, which often complicated the title or raised deeper questions about the images. Even as they introduced complications, the narrative panels were, visually and conceptually, easy to read. Ease of access was a hallmark of the minimalist installation design.The design concept was unambiguous: health and safety concerns in the era of COVID-19. The vast white space displayed fairly small (46 cm × 46 cm) unframed monochromatic photos, widely dispersed along the walls. Jones had worked with museum designers to ensure as much social-distancing space as possible for both museum visitors and the workers who installed the exhibition (Fig. 7). The curators extended their COVID-related concerns to include all the interested potential visitors who could experience Photo Cameroon only virtually, by producing several videos available online (see https://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/photo-cameroon).Jones and Zeitlyn managed to transform pandemic-related obstacles into significant contributions to the study and exhibition of African studio photography. Several years previously, Zeitlyn had worked to ensure that the negatives and original prints would remain in Cameroon with Chila, Finlak, and Toussele. Therefore, given COVID-19, the curators could not source fine-art prints from original negatives. Jones had museum prints made at the Fowler Museum from scans of negatives or prints. These relatively small museum prints made two valuable contributions.First, they called attention to the crucial fact that the negatives remain with the photographers in Cameroon. The section title “Preserving the Archive” encompassed the entire exhibition and the long-term project that inspired it. With a grant from the British Library's Endangered Archives, Zeitlyn had worked with Toussele in Mbouda to scan the 50,000 negatives still in the photographer's possession.Since the 1990s, when Western collectors first learned about African studio photographers, Africans have seen an alarming exodus of their precious continental heritage. Personal archives continue to flow out of Africa into the possession of European and North American collectors. Photo Cameroon showed scholars and museum professionals a powerful way to confront this urgent issue.In another contribution, these small museum prints rectified the excesses that marked the first exhibitions of African studio photography in Europe and the United States. In the 1990s, museums showed 70-inch-high prints of Seydou Keïta's portraits. The 18-inch-high Fowler Museum prints allowed visitors to approach the intimacy and warmth of viewing similarly sized photos on the walls of homes across Africa, where they are the prized heritage of the sitters’ children and grandchildren This intimate viewing experience replaced my initial feeling of a cold immense space. The large distances provided the rare freedom to immerse myself in a photo without focusing part of my attention on the need to avoid blocking or jostling other viewers. Visitors had the luxury of single-mindedly concentrating on the world in the images (Fig. 8).Adding to the sense of intimacy, the explanatory text offered yet another unusual feature. The curators had identified the names of many sitters, sometimes their town or village, and their relationships. They told stories of sourcing this information from neighbors, friends, and relatives of the people in the photos. Seldom do exhibition curators of twentieth century African studio photography have this deep personal acquaintance of the photographers and their clients. Specialists concerned to honor the right and desire of African people to keep their artistic heritage on the African continent could find interesting practice here.