Abstract
The “Anthropobiological Mission of Angola” is one of the portuguesese anthropological missions carried out in the 20th century. Thousands of photographs and around 646 identification cards were produced, many of them with frontal and profile portraits (bertillonage). On October 10, 1950, Antônio Marques de Almeida Júnior, photographer, reported in his diary that he found a woman named Tereza, who participated in the colonial exhibition “O mundo português” (1940). However, none of the photographic files identifies the names of the people who were photographed. The lack of identification is a specific mark of this colonial mission. This characteristic does not allow us to find the faces of those people who had their measurements taken that year, much less Tereza’s face. My investigation starts from this search for the face of Tereza who was at the human zoo set up in Lisbon and who, 10 years later, is found again by the photographer at the Mission. Images of the women photographed were collected, but we do not know which of these images shows Tereza, nor do we know her story. The idea is to try to insert Tereza’s history in this absence that is installed in the Portuguese historical archive, but which at the same time shows itself as a way of inserting the stories of so many “Terezas” who were in Portugal and had their stories erased by Portuguese colonialism.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Images Do Not Represent Us, They Create Us: The Image and its Transforming Power
KEYWORDS
COLONIAL PHOTOGRAPHY; WOMEN BODY; DECOLONIZATION, VISUAL CULTURE
