Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975

This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories – Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe – deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership. 

Filipa Lowndes Vicente is a Researcher and Deputy Director at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). She was a Visiting Professor at Brown University (2016) and at King’s College, University of London (2015). Among her books are Other Orientalisms: India between Florence and Bombay 1860–1900, published in 2012, and, in 2014, the edited volume O Império da Visão. Fotografia no Contexto Colonial Português (1860–1960) [The Empire of Vision. Photography in the Portuguese Colonial Context (1860–1960)].

Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (2020) and an Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin (2019). He is the co-editor, with Tom Snow, of the book Activism (2023).