I first became aware of Paul Gebauer’s photography about fifteen years ago when I was helping to organize a small exhibition at Gallery DeRoche in San Francisco of traditional Cameroon objects from his estate. The consignor, his son, produced a couple of very old photo albums and three small binders of negatives, all meticulously organized and labeled. What I found in them was remarkable. There is certainly no shortage of colonial and missionary photography of Africa in the early twentieth century but these were somehow different. There was a deep sense of humanity in these images that spoke of a special relationship of trust and respect between the photographer and his subjects, rather like Will Soule’s images of Southern Plains Indians. Gebauer’s were sometimes tinged with humor, which also spoke of a close connection, and they showed true artistry in composition and choice.

Gebauer was a missionary who was active in various parts of Cameroon from 1931 until 1961, although he also returned in later years. His grandfather, Karl Gebauer, had been a founding member of the Kameruner Baptisten Mission in the 1890s. His father was unable to serve in the mission but Paul and his older brother were both involved, the latter in an administrative capacity and the former in the field, having become a United States citizen and functioning in Cameroon under the auspices of the American branch of the Mission. The family had been collecting Cameroon art since shortly after the inception of the mission, and Gebauer continued on this track. After his first posting between 1931 and 1934, he returned to Germany, where he organized a small exhibition of Cameroon art at the mission office. The local Nazi authority shut it down within twenty-four hours as “degenerate art,” but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Permission was obtained to export the material to the United States, which quite likely saved it from destruction. Gebauer and his wife Clara, whom he married in 1935, returned to Cameroon that year, where they continued their missionary work and continued to collect the region’s material culture. Having been raised with a strong sensitivity to the culture, his process for this was to gather the pieces either by rescuing examples that had been discarded or acquiring them through gifts from friends in the local hierarchy. He collected data as much or more than objects, and every piece was thoroughly documented with sketches, measurements, descriptions, and relevant field observations. Today the bulk of this collection is split between two institutions, the Portland Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Most of the content of both donations was published posthumously in Gebauer’s sprawling work, Art of Cameroon (Gebauer 1979), which remains a standard and valuable reference. 

Most of Gebauer’s papers, library of books and journals about Africa, and, in particular, his photo archive also went to the Met after his death in 1977. This included some 11,000 images in both black and white and color that he took there over his thirty-year sojourn. Virginia-Lee Webb, the Met’s research curator for the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, has published on the subject of Gebauer’s photography, notably in African Arts (Webb 1987) and Tribal Art (Webb 2006) magazines. In this short article, I will try to add to rather than repeat her insights.

The few albums and negative binders that remained with the family were held back from the initial gift to the Met apparently because they contained a number of images—portraits, travel pictures, etc.—that Clara considered to be of more interest to their family than to researchers. She passed away in 2004 and these albums and negatives will soon rejoin the rest of the Gebauer archive at the Metropolitan Museum as a promised gift. While Clara may have had personal interest in these, Cameroon scholars and those interested in photography in a broader sense will find them remarkable. They date from Gebauer’s first tour of the country (1931–1934) and thus are his earliest photo documents of the region. As Webb observed, the negatives differ from most of the ones in the Met archive, which tend to be either 35 mm rolls or Kodachrome slides. Instead they are what Gebauer refers to in his notes as German Prints (Webb 2006: 134), possibly indicating that they were printed when he returned to that country in 1934, and measure approximately 2 ˝” x 4”. We know Gebauer used a 35mm Leica for most of his later images, but these are clearly from a different camera.

The prints that were placed in roughly corresponding albums are the same size as the original negatives, indicating that they were produced by contact printing, a process common in the nineteenth century, in which the negative is essentially laid directly on the photo paper and then exposed, resulting in a positive of the same size. Given the small size of the negatives, this doesn’t allow much detail to be seen in the positives, which were certainly produced for Gebauer’s own reference and files. Some of these appear in his Art of Cameroon but are not identified by date or even attributed to a photographer apart from a brief reference in the colophon.

When enlarged, these images reveal worlds of detail and sensitivity, as well as some effects that may be intentional or accidental, but in either case highly effective. The format of these images is unusual by today’s standards, being about a five to eight ratio. This is almost a panoramic perspective, and one well suited to capturing the visual drama as a line of water carriers approaching the entrance to a building while the sun is low in the sky. Both Webb in one of her articles (Webb 1987: 49) and Susan Vogel in an introduction to Art of Cameroon (Gebauer 1979: XIV) refer to a special camera brace Gebauer used, which would allow for long exposures. He may have used this on such shots but his portraits, which are generally in vertical format, reveal a different technique. The backgrounds of these have a blurred, watery quality, indicating that he cranked the F-stop all the way open for a narrow focal depth but a maximum speed of exposure in the bright sunlight. While he sometimes missed the optimal focus (and of course wouldn’t be able to tell until the film was developed), when it did work, it was highly effective. His image of a “mail runner” at the Ndu Baptist Mission has an ethereal and timeless quality.

Some of the images are snapshots, like his strangely intimidating “Cows,” but most are carefully posed and composed. Some, like a man on a suspension bridge or a young Ntumbu noblewoman looking at the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung are obvious in this regard, but others are more subtle. Take for example his image labeled “Banyang Street.” At first glance it is a simple street scene. A more careful look reveals not only the obvious V of rooftops receding in perspective, but also a deliberate central pyramidal structure formed by the human subjects, the left-most group of which are arrayed by height in a secondary pyramid that projects out of the center of the frame, giving a quiet street scene a remarkable sense of dynamism. Coincidence?

As noted in the beginning, what is most interesting and telling is his clear relationship with his subjects and his obvious sensitivity in approaching them. His portrait of the Chief of Bum radiates royal authority, as does that of the Chief of Tungo and his brother. As in the very best photography, the strength of the image comes from neither within the camera or the simple appearance of the subject. It lies in the tension in the spaces between the subject, the lens, and the photographer, and can best be seen in his image labeled “Famous Mbembe Cicatrization.” This captures a stunning range of emotion from its young subject, who confronts the photographer with one hand closed in a fist and the other flexed open. This transcends documentary photography and moves in a realm rare even in contemporary fine art.  

References

Gebauer, Paul. Art of Cameroon. Portland Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Portland and New York, 1979.
Webb, Virginia-Lee. “The Photographs of Paul Gebauer,” in African Arts, 20:2, Feb. 1987.
———. “Paul Gebauer: A Legacy of Images,” in Tribal Arts, X:4, Summer 2006.