MOBILISING ARCHIVES: PHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHWEST ANGOLA

Principal Investigator: Inês Ponte

Partner: Museu Nacional de Etnologia

Partially funded by the European Comission/Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (747508) and by the Foundation for Science and Technology/Postdoctoral Individual Fellowship (SFRH/BPD/115706/2016)

The project Mobilizing Archives: photography in Southwest Angola investigates the development of ethnographic field photography through collections created between the 1930s and 1990s. Combining archival research in Portugal and fieldwork in Angola, it focuses on 3 photographic collections and its archives, and on the contemporary response of local populations to photographs taken both in the colonial and post-independence periods of Angola.    The project approaches the relationship between photography and the ethnographic work of Father Carlos Estermann (1896-1976), missionary of the Holy Spirit Congregation, between the 1930s and 1973. It also examines the collection of António Carreira (1905-1988), produced in the context of Ethnographic Field Missions carried out between 1965 and 1969 for the nowadays National Museum of Ethnology, along with the relevant documentation integrated in its Historical Archive. Finally, it also explores the collection of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941-2010), covering the 1990s, and in contrast to the two other collections, more focused on an ethnic group, the ovakuvale pastoralists, in a Post-independent Angola.

IMAGE: Album with small prints by P. Carlos Estermann, Archive of the Portuguese Province of the Holy Spirit Congregation. Photo by Inês Ponte, 2017.