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.