Flashmag November 2020 www.flashmag.net
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Elia Hoimian, his colleague reporter photographer at Blacknews.fr testifies: “My first memories of Bill are lost in the concerts… practically all that the bubbling musical world, of the 90s could offer us. Paris was moving, Paris was alive. It was the beginnings of hip-hop, the first successes of African music, the birth of trip-hop, acid-jazz, Brit Soul, the times when Reggae lived through the passage of these great legends at the Bataclan or the Elysée Montmartre, under the leadership of Garance or another intrepid Cameroonian, who resisted, Simon.
Young editor of Black News magazine, I often met Bill at these concerts, from afar, this tall man, always smiling, with his camera in hand, when it was not a glass of beer, intrigued me. A few years later, I found myself in the afternoons at his house, doing photoshoots for "Sisters's", the new women's magazine I was about to release. And "Bill" had kindly agreed to accompany me on this adventure and to be its appointed photographer and artistic director. Our sessions always well watered, were spent in good humor, laughter, jokes well from home, and some saucy (sic). Bill was always playful, smiling, laughing out loud, with a bonhomie he never lost. The "Sisters" project did not come to fruition in the end, and I had left France for a long time. And lost sight of Bill. To learn yesterday that he had been very ill for some time, even on dialysis and eventually died of cancer. "
Jacques Matinet, one of his longtime acolytes, in a portrait article published in Le Matin de Paris, said of big Bill, because he was almost 2 meters that: "Akwa Bétotè, it is indeed, a gaze which fixes on the film the emergence of new cultures with melting colors; with Paris and its suburbs as its home port. An unusual, unprecedented work, a dark gaze of a mutant on mutants which participates as much in the fleeting moments of the street, of the night, of everyday faces as of the vibrations of places that are born and die ...
A photography that draws its vitality from movement, the pleasure of surprise, the impertinence of the gaze, the freedom of language ... In any case the arrival of a photographer with an intimate and deep gaze that mixes incongruity and macro- history, and creates its own dynasty.
Akwa Bétotè is a photographer of the mediums, a witness, a subject, a language in himself, not only that of the images but one which allows to speak of the image in any circumstance, in any place whatsoever."
Africultures in a biographical article at the time of his exhibition Paris 80 Pulsations in 2015 underlines that: “Bill Akwa Bétotè was born in Cameroon in 1952 in Douala. In 1972, when he was only 20 years old, he moved to France. His passion for photography, linked to his curiosity for these "new cultures" which emerged at that time in the Parisian suburbs and would soon fill the small and large theaters in France and beyond, made Bill Akwa Bétotè the first African photographic chronicler of these phenomena. The first media to welcome his photographs are newspapers focused on current events in Africa, then it is the turn of all the dailies or magazines interested in this music, these lifestyles, these fashions. He follows all the cultural sagas, mixed or not, which express themselves on music with "ethnos" roots amplified by the sounds of a transversal world, constantly renewed. Some people know that it is difficult to account for musical performances with agitated and kaleidoscopic atmospheres. Bill Akwa Bétotè avoids all the "clichés" of this kind of shooting, knowing how to make people guess behind his still images the mobility of colors, sounds, expressions of musicians, singers, and all the richness of these universes which illustrate our lives. "
In a portrait drawn by Jean Berry on his vast career, published on May 18, 2015, in the magazine Africulture.com on the occasion of his exhibition Paris 80 - Pulsations, from May 12 to June 1, 2015 at the Théâtre Berthelot in Montreuil as part of the Rares Talents festival, and from July 1 to 29, 2015 at Cabaret Sauvage as part of the Black Summer Festival; we could read:
- “Miriam Makeba, Fela Kuti, Salif Keïta… In the 1980s, the Cameroonian photographer immortalized in black and white, the first steps of African artists in the French capital. A unique work on a movement of identity affirmation, which today reveals its historical dimension.
Bill Akwa Bétotè grew up in Douala in the 1960s. It was his uncle, a businessman, who brought back pictures from Japan or the United States, who gave him a taste for travel and pictures. “At the time, there was no TV. We listened to the radio, we read the newspapers. Photography remained a mystery. This form of medium allowed me to escape, to have my own territory, to imagine life differently ".
Arrived in France to study economics, the great Cameroonian chose to live off his passion. In Marseille, where he lived in the second half of the 1970s, he learned the tricks of the trade alongside a Corsican photographer, between weddings and studio portraits. “Photography has become essential to me as it allows me to express myself and meet people. It was even the trigger for my bond with others. I had found my way ".