OTHER PHOTO-GEOGRAPHIES

Abstract

When the aim nowadays is to write history, in this case, to explore a certain period in the history of Contemporary Portuguese Photography, we will always encounter the problem of what to frame and what to illuminate. Walter Benjamin wrote that history was like a “mosaic” or the result of “illuminations”, while Bruno Latour spoke about the opposition between the modern and the primitive that seems to reflect the way history of art, especially that of photography, has evolved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This article aims to disclose the more hidden and lesser-known history drawing upon Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal history to trace a view of Portuguese photography in the 1990s and 2000s and to describe the manner in which Portuguese artists came to assert themselves. It will contextualize the way their photographic language began to distance itself from the narrower practices of photography with which they had at first been linked.