Cornélius Yao Azaglo Augustt

Cornélius Yao Azaglo Augustt (born 1924 in Kpalimé ; died on May 25, 2001 in Bouaké ) was a West African photographer who worked in Côte d'Ivoire .

Life

Augustt was born in what is now Togo and grew up there, but due to the nationality of his parents considered himself a Ghanaian and descendant of the former local royal family of Tay Asboso (evidenced by an heirloom or throne). In his youth he had various jobs, including as a telegram messenger and as a stoker and machinist on the Takoradi - Kumasi railway line . In 1951 he moved from Ghana to Upper Volta for better work , where he learned to take photos with a camera as an accountant in a factory in Bobo-Dioulasso . He made his first experiences with an old box camera- Kodak model .

At the age of 31 Augustt migrated to Côte d'Ivoire, where he was permanently resident in Korhogo from 1955 until the end of his life . His entrepreneurial breakthrough came with the independence of the state: passport photos had to be taken for the entire population in one fell swoop. Augustt moved with a Mobylette -Moped, his Rolleiflex camera and a mobile screen through the villages and people portrayed on these photos, ignoring the requirements for passport photos and busts created, enabled subsequently cut to the head.

After the passport photo boom subsided, Augustt expanded his Studio Du Nord, which had already opened in 1958, to include real interiors and the first photo studio in a wide area. He advertised the service as "day and night photography" and the Kodak brand. He only wants the studio, which is open around the clock, to be closed once in 40 years: when there were riots against Ghanaian businessmen in Korhogo after the local football club's defeat by Asante Kotoko SC in the semi-finals of the African Champions Cup . He was active as head of the local union for Ghanaian citizens in the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire . The photographer was critical of the advent of color film: color photos faded, black and white photos are eternal; to that extent he did not compete with color photographers on principle. When a color photo studio was opened in Korhogo in 1987, it threatened his existence and the business end was foreseeable.

Unlike many of his competitors, however, he had kept his well-organized image archive, including negatives, well protected from the weather. His work was discovered in the early 1990s by the anthropologist Jean-François Werner , who enthusiastically cataloged Augustt's photo archive. For the years between 1958 and 1994 it counted 96,345 recordings with locations and dates. Between 1991 and 1994 Augustt's work was reviewed by Werner and the Paris Revue Noire , and Augustt's photographs have been exhibited in photo galleries in Paris, London and New York.

In March 1997 Augustt traveled to an exhibition in Paris in Europe for the first time, and later in the same year he was also in Hamburg for an exhibition opening. He saw his daily work not influenced by the international recognition, which he was pleased about and which secured his business threatened by competition.

"[His] simple pictures have a brilliant clarity to this day: [...] the self-confidence of the posing people, which he captured unpretentiously, gives the pictures a more than photographic power."

The Ivorian photo reporter Dorris Haron Kasco completed a 52-minute biographical film of Augustt in 2002, which he called Djaatala , with the subtitle Preneur d'ombres (German roughly: lifters of the shadows).

Private life

In the course of his life Augustt was in a relationship with four women, married three of them, and had twelve children. Among the eight sons were his business heirs Samson (born 1976) and Emmanuel (born 1971) as well as the second oldest son Christophe, who set up his own photo studio in Daloa .

Exhibitions

• 1994 - L'œil du temps, les photographes de Côte d'Ivoire (group exhibition at the Abidjan cultural center)
• 1996 - African Photographers, 1940 to Present (group exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum , New York)
• 1996 - Secondes Rencontres de la photographie africaine (group exhibition in the cultural palace of Bamako)
• 1997 - Art et tradition du portrait en Afrique (group exhibition in the gallery FNAC-Étoile, Paris)
• 1997 - The Face of Africa (group exhibition, Gruner + Jahr - Pressehaus , Hamburg)
• 1997 - La vie quotidienne d'un photographe de studio en Côte d'Ivoire . (Solo exhibition, organized with J.-F. Werner, in the Abidjan cultural center)
• 1998–2003 - L'Afrique par elle-même (part of the traveling exhibition of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren , Belgium; together with the magazine Revue Noire : stations in France, Germany, England, Belgium, Brazil, South Africa and the USA )
• 1998 - Snap me one! Studio photographers in Africa (group exhibition in the Munich City Museum )
• 2000 - Portrait Africa (group exhibition in the House of World Cultures in Berlin)
• 2001 - Foire Internationale Africaine des Arts plastiques (group exhibition in Abidjan)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Andrian Kreye : Africa - Totally normal , In: Geo 12/1997 , pp. 76–84.
2. ↑ Short biography of the Paris-Africa Gallery
3. ^ Jean-François Werner: La sauvegarde du patrimoine photographique africain. Le cas des archives de Cornélius A. Augustt . In: Études photographiques , pp. 138–145, November 8, 2000.
4. ↑ Jean-François Werner: Le rapport August: Enquête ethno-historique sur un photographe de Côte d'Ivoire , 268 pages; Created in 2005 and corrected with changes in 2018. Accessed June 23, 2021.
5. ↑ Christiane cooling: passport photos for posterity , taz on 19 November 1997 on the occasion of the exhibition opening in Hamburg (see above); accessed on June 26, 2021.