Matos, Patrícia Ferraz de, 2023, "To See Is to Know? Anthropological Differentiations on Portuguese Colonial Photography Through the Work of Mendes Correia”. In: Vicente, F.L., Ramos, A.D. (eds) Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 171-192. (original) (raw)
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This paper discusses the outset of the relationship between anthropology and photography in Brazil, aiming to systematize, for educational purposes, a history of the photographic production of an ethnographic character produced in the country from mid-19th to mid-20th century. That is, a timeframe prior the institutionalization of the discipline in Brazil, and the creation of the first research centers for Visual Anthropology, in the 1980s. Simultaneously to organizing such productions, we point gaps in the traced history that indicate important future developments. Thus, this paper addresses a story to be reconstructed that, even so, is worth telling. 1. A previous version of this text was drafted for a training course in photographic production offered by IPHAN as part of a training for Cultural Heritage management between 2017 and 2018. I would like to thank the DPI/IPHAN’s team, especially Ivana Medeiros Pacheco Cavalcante, who assisted me throughout the research and the develop...
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Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975. F. L. Vicente & A. Ramos (eds)., 2023
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The pervasiveness of images of black women's unclothed bodies in the Portu-guese colonial visual archive from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s—in photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibition ephemera or as illustrations in newspapers—demonstrates that the gendered and racialized body of (unnamed) women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony. The Portuguese colonial context, similar to other colonial contexts, reveals the banal-ization of the practice of white men photographing black colonized women. Is resistance or participation in the " event of photography " possible for these photographed women? This article will discuss some of the issues and challenges of dealing with these images through specific case studies: postcards of semi-naked African women between the ethnographic and the erotic; images of women exhibited in colonial exhibitions; private photographs of Portuguese soldiers next to African women; but also the counter narratives to an hegemonic visuality.
The Brazilian woman: from the colonial photography to contemporary Portuguese photography
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