PHOTO STUDIO JEUNESSE
CAMEROON PHOTO STUDIO


Talk about your brand

The case of the surviving archive of the Photo Jeunesse studio not only shows us the changes in Cameroonian society over more than three decades, but also its loose ends - the details of its painted settings and the playful attitudes of its sometimes eccentric users - all of which tell an alternative history of the photographic studio, and its ability to represent not only the dignified and formal version of the client but also the excess that surrounds it.
The case of the surviving archive of the Photo Jeunesse studio not only shows us the changes in Cameroonian society over more than three decades, but also its loose ends - the details of its painted settings and the playful attitudes of its sometimes eccentric users - all of which tell an alternative history of the photographic studio, and its ability to represent not only the dignified and formal version of the client but also the excess that surrounds it. 

Photo Jeunesse's subjects are different from those of other studios and a characterisation of them is complicated: there are young people in suits and dark glasses who seem to dance the moment the camera captures them, little brothers and sisters in coordinated Sunday outfits, some portrait subjects hide - with little success - behind different elements of the studio's painted scenery, making it clear that this business was attended not only by Yaoundé's most favoured but by an interesting diversity that filled this archive with colour and movement.

Antoine d'Agata 
Marseille, France.

We present for the first time in Mexico this exhibition that brings together thirty-three images from the photographic studio Photo Jeunesse, from Cameroon, Africa.

Intense red curtains, artificial plants, painted stage backdrops, flowerpots and many other objects appear as part of the setting in these images that allow us to enter moments of a studio that shows the gaze of a society towards itself, images of internal, almost intimate consumption.

The photos in this archive have travelled in a different way from the traditional way, such as family exchanges and epistolary romances, first arriving in Europe thanks to Timothy Prus, director of the independent collection and publisher The Archive of Modern Conflict, who on a trip to Cameroon acquired hundreds of colour negatives from the son of the founder of Photo Jeunesse.

This group of images, mostly taken between 1970 and 1980 and made to capture intimate, family moments of the studio's clients, were incorporated along with an essay by Duncan Wooldridge in issue 10 of his publication AMC. 

OBRA DE PHOTO JEUNESSE

We invite you to take one of the Photo Jeunesse photographs we have for sale at Hydra.
BUY HERE

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ARkIVE OF MODERN CONFLICT

We invite you to learn more about the Archive of Modern Conflict, a collection of over nine million images of contemporary conflict open to the public in London, UK. 

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