This photo triggers so many associations, I don't know where to begin. The shirt this lady is wearing looks like a sponsor shirt. I cannot make out all the text, but I see “Lourdes”, “1988” (I think) and “Brandstoffen VDK” (?). Of course my eyes were drawn to the word brandstoffen, Dutch for fuels. There is a company called VDK Brandstoffen, Van den Kerchove Brandstoffen, in Knesselare, Belgium, but I can't find any information about any sponsorships some decades ago.
It's hard to imagine the odyssey this shirt must have made to end up in a photo studio in Mbouda, Cameroon – and the journey the image itself made from “plastic negative”, as it is called on the archive website, to scanned TIFF image, to an uploaded JPG file and to an image projected on my computer screen.
Since the photo was made in 1991, long before things started to leave all sorts of electronic trails, there is no telling what happened to the woman in the portrait. All we know the photo was taken by a photographer called Jacques Touselle of “Photo Jacques” in Mbouda, Western Province, Cameroon, and the 120 negative was stored in what was later known as “box 6”, labelled “01/03/1991”.
Archiving a Cameroonian Photographic Studio - Background
From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme - 16. Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio, David Zeitlyn
Jacques Touselle leaflet (PDF)
