JACQUES TOUSSELE
Selection of archive photos taken
by Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele in 1973
Jacques Toussele immortalized by David Zeitlyn in his last studio in Mbouda, Cameroon.
Jacques Toussele was born in 1939 in Bamessingué, a village located between Babadjou and Mbouda in the West Region of Cameroon. He learned photography from a Nigerian photographer. He worked in Bamenda during the Bamiléké War and then returned to Mbouda, where he practiced his profession from the mid-1960s until the early 2000s at "Studio Photo Jacques."
His works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Carleton College. The photographs taken by the Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele between 1960 and 1980 were taken against a backdrop of violence: the uprising of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), which began before Cameroon's independence and continued throughout the following decade. The fight against the UPC "terrorists," waged by the Cameroonian state and the French army, was marked by widespread violence.
They show young people from Mbouda displaying the trappings of modernity. Shortly after independence, in western Cameroon, the violence and promises of modernity of the 1960s posed challenges to traditional social structures. He died on June 30, 2017, in Douala.
A local perspective clearly shows that violence was omnipresent in its absence and denial: organizing an event was no small feat and, like the birth of a child, had to be celebrated and documented through photography.
Exhibitions
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« African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization and Style », Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, 2017
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« Staging Selves: Cameroonian Portrait Photography », Gould Library Exhibitions, 2012
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« Studio Cameroon: the everyday photography of Toussele Jacques », Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 2007-2008
Texts : Cambridge University Press - Journal Africa / Volume 94 issue 1 :
"Intimacy in a violent context: photographs from Mbouda (Cameroon) in a time of troubles"
Pictures : Endangered Archives Programme : Search results | Endangered Archives Programme