Images Publicitaires au Cameroun

Entre Propagande, Imposture et Éducation aux Médias

Abstract

Advertising images are fashionable in urban displays in Cameroon. However, the tradition of advertising images appears to be a colonial legacy, linked to the birth of the Cameroonian press in 1955, which featured targeted advertising images combining two figures, as in urban advertising, reminiscent of the figurative paintings intended for anthropomorphic games in the 17th century in Western aesthetics. Furthermore, urban posters reveal a more recent model of popularised images in which figures of celebrities, scenes from everyday life and manufactured products are gradually superimposed in the geometric space of the poster. This corresponds to a figurative convention dear to African arts in particular, the symbolic gradation of ancestral figures in the treatment of bas-reliefs. In addition to being remarkable, like some of the aforementioned masterpieces of humanity, these images carry colonial memory, while now being the subject of public exhibition. They deserve to be preserved and safeguarded to serve the collective memory. However, a regulatory framework limited to commercial activity remains conducive to the exclusivity of advertising, propaganda and deception. This raises many research issues, such as understanding the mechanisms of appropriation of advertising imagery, the contexts in which propaganda and deceptive advertising images are produced, and the meaning of representations in situ. In conjunction with a synchronic reading imposed by the sole view of urban advertising displays, this research proposes a diachronic analysis of images based on two chrono-advertising divisions, in order to better understand the scope of the art phenomenon and its psychology on the various protagonists of advertising and, therefore, to consider the need for media education.
Keywords: Advertising images, appropriation of advertising imagery, propaganda, imposture, collective memory, media literacy, Cameroon.