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The Archive is Present
Performing a Story of Dictatorship Through the Family Album
- Vol. 5, no. 2
- 2020
- https://doi.org/10.47659/m9.032.ess
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The Archive is Present
Performing a Story of Dictatorship Through the Family Album
- Vol. 5, no. 2
- 2020
- 21/07/2021

Abstract
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This essay describes an investigation into a family photographic archive that belonged to my grandparents and represent a period in Portugal’s past (1940–1975) scarred by one of the longest dictatorships in history. The research carries out an ‘iconographic’ analysis of the photographs in the family albums and on how these were influenced by the consistent and highly visual propaganda of the New State regime (1933–1974). It demonstrates how the iconography of this visual propaganda embedded itself into the family album, specifically regarding its propaganda strategy and its ideology and politics towards women. Later these findings were explored through performance photography, creating a photographic body of work. Focusing mostly on the figure of my grandmother and exploring pose and gesture, which were subsequently re-performed for the camera. The information contained within the archive images is re-written within the performance images.
- Keywords: archive, dictatorship, photography and performative, visual propaganda, visualization of the role of women
Ana Janeiro holds a PhD from the University of Westminster (2019) and an MA in Photography from KIAD (currently UCA) in Rochester, UK. She studied Fine Arts at the Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon. She has exhibited regularly since mid-2000. The following solo shows are of special note: The Archive is Present, London Gallery West, London, UK (2019); ALBUM, Índia Portuguesa 1951-1961, Laboratório das Artes, Guimarães, Portugal (2010). Recently, she participated in the following group shows: GoaPhoto, Revisiting the Album, Aldona, Goa, Índia, (2019); hyphen- an exposition between art and research, AmbikaP3, London, UK, (2019); Beyond the mirror, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2017/18). She is an Invited Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Media Studies of the Lisbon Polytechnic. She is represented in several art collections.
- Bate, David. 2010. “The Memory of Photography.” Photographies 3 (2): 243–57.
- Carvalheiro, José, and Maria Silveirinha. 2015. “Acting on the Body of the Audience: Dictatorship, Hegemony, and Gender Censorship in Portugal.” Feminist Media Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1028423
- Cova, Anne, and António Costa Pinto. 2002. “Women under Salazar’s Dictatorship.” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 1 (2): 129–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/pjss.1.2.129
- Janeiro Fernandes, Ana. 2019. Gazing at the Family: Archives, Performance and Portuguese Photography (1940-1975). University of Westminster.
- Sontag, Susan. 1980. »Fascinating Fascism.« In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 73–105.
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Photography was key to the regime’s propaganda and one of the most widely used tools to spread the ideals of the New State and of the ‘politics of the spirit’.
- Cover photo: From the Fernandes archive. © 2019, Ana Janeiro
Reading time: 8 min.
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