22 december 2016
21 december 2016
Jacques Toussele Photographs: box 6 [c 1991] 195 / 247
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)
20 december 2016
Jacques Toussele Photographs: box 1 [c 1986] 7 / 147
"Jacques Toussele commissioned portraits of people from Mbouda, West Cameroon. Many of the photos are of individuals for Identity Cards and other administrative pruposes but also recreataional, family groups etc. The archives represent a record of life in this area in the 1970s and 1980s.
The aim of the project was to help protect the personal photographic archives of Mr J Toussele, a Cameroonian photographer in the town of Mbouda, Western Region, Cameroon. The archives represent a record of life in this area over the past thirty years. Before the project began they were in a poor state of preservation
The economic basis for professional black and white photography in Cameroon disappeared in 1998 with the introduction of new identity cards. They were issued with instant photographs, removing the need for 'passport photographs'. These had been the main work of rural photographers who could process and print the film without needing access to electricity. A small supporting industry of photographers, such as have been celebrated in exhibitions e.g. of the work of Seidou Keita, has effectively been destroyed by computerisation of the identity cards and the arrival of cheaper colour 35mm processing in the cities. One such studio photographer is Jacques Toussele, with a collection of some 20,000 negatives."
“Prince Mbilini”
Photographer: Unknown
Photo & Text Source: Swaziland Digital Archives
This is often claimed to be the first photo of a Swazi, Prince Mbilini, circa 1860. It isn't Mbilini, nor is it Mswati as claimed by Neil Parsons in his A New History of Southern Africa ( p.137). It is a drawing of a photograph and the photograph was reproduced as Mswati in Saunders's Black Leaders in Southern African History (p.62) with National Archives also getting the credit. Ian Knight reproduces it in his There Will be an Awful Row At Home About This (p.39) and identifies the main figure as Ngoza kaLudaba of the Cube.
Mbilini, by the way, was not the heir and certainly died outside the Swazi country - he was mortally wounded by a British patrol whilst on a cattle rustling expedition near Lüneburg in April 1879. S. Bourquin has a photograph of a man he names as Mbilini in his collection. It has been reproduced several times, on p.33 of Ian Knight's Brave Men's Blood, for example, and could well be authentic.
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