Books by Paulo Ribeiro Baptista
The Roaring Twenties in Lisbon, 2023
II Conference on Research in History of Photography-1839-1939: A Century of Photography, 2018
One of the most innovative technical and aesthetic aspects of the photographic practice from the ... more One of the most innovative technical and aesthetic aspects of the photographic practice from the mid- l 920s and 1930s was three-dimensionality, or the suggestion of volume on the two-dimensional surface of the photographic print. ln Portugal, this change appeared in the 1920s, and one of the first studios to explore it was Brazil studio, managed by Joaquim da Silva Nogueira.
This practice prefigured a situation of great modernity, closely connected with the renovation of the Portuguese theatre since most of the portraits taken by Silva Nogueira had actors and dancers as models.
ln this woy, we con look at this aesthetic renewal of the photographic portrait as one of the aspects that contributed to a paradigm shift in the representation of the human figure and his face, one of the aspects closely related to the renovotion of the stages, due to the influence of the cinema. Th1s wos precisely the cose of Silva Nogueira, who was also a film photographer and, in Portugal, first introduced a cinematographic lighting system in his studio.
Silva Nogueira's work had a great impact through the creative use of three-dimensionality, and his style became a reference for Portuguese photographers during the 1930s and 1940s.
Tendo como principal objecto de estudo e reflexão a extraordinária publicação de A Arte e a Natur... more Tendo como principal objecto de estudo e reflexão a extraordinária publicação de A Arte e a Natureza em Portugal, um volume com mais de 350 reproduções fotográficas de superior qualidade e grande dimensão, esta obra segue um percurso pelos meandros da fotografia portuguesa e da edição fotográfica de Oitocentos, procurando dar justa visibilidade ao empenho de um fotógrafo, editor e empreendedor alemão sediado no Porto, Emílio Biel, e da exemplar tradução editorial das cumplicidades que conseguiu estabelecer com algumas das mais importantes figuras da cultura do seu tempo, em particular com o primeiro historiador da arte portuguesa, Joaquim de Vasconcelos, com quem compartilhou a importante, e então inédita, preocupação pela preservação e divulgação do património.
A atriz, cantora e bailarina Luísa Satanela, uma das estrelas do teatro ligeiro português das déc... more A atriz, cantora e bailarina Luísa Satanela, uma das estrelas do teatro ligeiro português das décadas de 1920 e 1930, inovou com um estilo exuberante, trajos voluptuosos, exíguos e glamorosos, lantejoulas e plumas, de evidente inspiração hollywoodesca, na renovação da revista à portuguesa. Essa ousadia feminina tornou-a numa figura polémica do seu tempo. Muitas dessas situações foram fotografadas pelo modernista Silva Nogueira, revelando uma particular intuição relativamente à importância da imagem nessa era dos magazines ilustrados.
The actress, singer and dancer Luísa Satanela, one of Portuguese vaudeville theatre stars of the 1920’s and 1930’s, innovated with a flamboyant style of short, glamorous and voluptuous costumes, with sequins and feathers, influenced by Hollywood. She contributed for the renewal of the Revista à Portuguesa, a vaudevillelike theatre genre. Satanela’s boldness turned her into one of the most controversial figures of her time. Many of those bold situations were captured by Silva Nogueira, a modern photographer, with a complicity that revealed their deep intuition about the empowerment of the actors’ image in the age of the illustrated magazines.
A. França, circunscrita genericamente às artes plásticas, que são analisadas de forma quase isola... more A. França, circunscrita genericamente às artes plásticas, que são analisadas de forma quase isolada dos outros contextos do movimento, tem-se revelado profundamente redutora para um entendimento abrangente desse fenómeno pluridisciplinar e complexo, particularmente no campo das artes cénicas e da sua articulação com outras dimensões culturais, questões em que esses estudos são praticamente omissos. Uma das ideias propostas por J.-A. França que fez escola e esteve na génese da organização de várias exposições, catálogos e estudos académicos, foi o da existência de um círculo artístico e estético, fundamental para o movimento modernista português, que se poderia ter formado entre Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso 10 , o casal Sónia e Robert Delaunay, durante as suas estadias em Portugal, Eduardo Viana 11 , eventualmente Almada Negreiros. Contudo, esse conceito e particularmente a suposta importância que esse "círculo" poderá ter representado para o modernismo português enquanto movimento, necessita de uma profunda revisão e reanálise. O próprio António Soares teve ocasião de expressar a sua veemente discordância desse entendimento do modernismo português que considerava uma moda ou, como sugeriu, um modedernismo à moda do Minho 12 . Efectivamente, a suposta existência de um "círculo
Papers by Paulo Ribeiro Baptista
Focales
La photographie a joué un rôle très important dans l’affirmation du modernisme au Portugal, notam... more La photographie a joué un rôle très important dans l’affirmation du modernisme au Portugal, notamment grâce à la relation qu'elle a établi avec les arts de la scène, plus particulièrement avec le théâtre et la danse, tels qu’ils se trouvent réunis dans une forme de vaudeville appelé Revista à portuguesa. Plusieurs acteurs et surtout un danseur, nommé Francis, qui a étroitement travaillé avec le photographe Silva Nogueira, ont participé tout à la fois à la modernisation de la pratique photographique et au renouvellement du théâtre portugais dans les années 1920-1930.
A atriz, cantora e bailarina Luísa Satanela, uma das estrelas do teatro ligeiro português das déc... more A atriz, cantora e bailarina Luísa Satanela, uma das estrelas do teatro ligeiro português das décadas de 1920 e 1930, inovou com um estilo exuberante, trajos voluptuosos, exíguos e glamorosos, lantejoulas e plumas, de evidente inspiração hollywoodesca, na renovação da revista à portuguesa. Essa ousadia feminina tornou-a numa figura polémica do seu tempo. Muitas dessas situações foram fotografadas pelo modernista Silva Nogueira, revelando uma particular intuição relativamente à importância da imagem nessa era dos magazines ilustrados. The actress, singer and dancer Luísa Satanela, one of Portuguese vaudeville theatre stars of the 1920’s and 1930’s, innovated with a flamboyant style of short, glamorous and voluptuous costumes, with sequins and feathers, influenced by Hollywood. She contributed for the renewal of the Revista à Portuguesa, a vaudevillelike theatre genre. Satanela’s boldness turned her into one of the most controversial figures of her time. Many of those bold situations were captured by Silva Nogueira, a modern photographer, with a complicity that revealed their deep intuition about the empowerment of the actors’ image in the age of the illustrated magazines.
Outras obras de referência sobre história da fotografia também merecem menção, não tanto pela ino... more Outras obras de referência sobre história da fotografia também merecem menção, não tanto pela inovação mas sobretudo pela abordagem de fotógrafos e movimentos que não couberam na exemplar economia da obra de Newhall,
Vista, 2018
Durante a década de 1920 e o início da de 1930 a cultura visual portuguesa sofreu uma profunda ... more Durante a década de 1920 e o início da de 1930 a cultura visual portuguesa sofreu uma profunda transformação, percetível nos magazines ilustrados de grande circulação. Um dos primeiros traços dessa mudança terá sido o da renovação da Ilustração Portuguesa, em 1921, com um novo diretor, António Ferro, apoiado pelo jornalista e consultor Leitão de Barros. Traziam um programa visual modernizado que viria a ter continuidade noutros magazines ilustrados e em particular, desde 1927, no Notícias Ilustrado, com um figurino visual cosmopolita, em linha com os magazines ilustrados internacionais.Foi Ferro que, em Portugal, se aventurou primeiro num género de jornalismo com recurso exaustivo à imagem, quer com imagens sugeridas pela sua escrita quer com o uso da fotografia, muitas vezes só com legenda, como sucedeu frequentemente no Notícias Ilustrado.Porventura o ponto mais alto do jornalismo “visual” de António Ferro terá sido a longa entrevista a Salazar, publicada no...
Actas do 2º Colóquio "Saudade Perpétua", 2020
Alfred Fillon (1825-1881), francês emigrado em Portugal por razões políticas,
foi uma das figuras... more Alfred Fillon (1825-1881), francês emigrado em Portugal por razões políticas,
foi uma das figuras mais importantes da fotografia portuguesa de oitocentos.
Fixando-se em Portugal na década de 1850, Fillon tornou o seu estabelecimento
fotográfico num dos mais destacados estúdios portugueses e tornar-se-ia numa
referência para as casas fotográficas portuguesas. Nele se fizeram fotografar as
mais importantes figuras da sociedade portuguesa do seu tempo, em particular
os membros da família real. A sua ligação aos meios teatrais, enquanto fotógrafo
do Teatro Nacional, trouxe-lhe enorme prestígio e muitas das fotografias de
artistas foram publicadas na revista O Contemporâneo.
Focales, 2019
La photographie a joué un rôle très important dans l’affirmation du modernisme au Portugal, notam... more La photographie a joué un rôle très important dans l’affirmation du modernisme au Portugal, notamment grâce à la relation qu'elle a établi avec les arts de la scène, plus particulièrement avec le théâtre et la danse, tels qu’ils se trouvent réunis dans une forme de vaudeville appelé Revista à portuguesa. Plusieurs acteurs et surtout un danseur, nommé Francis, qui a étroitement travaillé avec le photographe Silva Nogueira, ont participé tout à la fois à la modernisation de la pratique photographique et au renouvellement du théâtre portugais dans les années 1920-1930.
During the 1920s and early 1930s the Portuguese visual culture underwent a profound transformatio... more During the 1920s and early 1930s the Portuguese visual culture underwent a profound transformation, which was noticeable in the illustrated magazines of great circulation. One of the first features of this change was the renovation of the Ilustração Portuguesa in 1921, with a new director, António Ferro with new sections and a modernized visual layout which would be followed shortly by other Portuguese illustrated magazines. That was the case, since 1927, of the Notícias Ilustrado, a new magazine with cosmopolitan graphics, following contemporary international illustrated magazines. It was Ferro, who in Portugal had first ventured into a genre of journalism with exhaustive recourse to the image, either with images suggested by his writing or with the use of photography, often only with caption, as was often the case in Notícias Ilustrado. Perhaps the highest point of the "visual" journalism of António Ferro was the long interview with Salazar, published in the Diário de Notícias in 1932. The virtuosity with which António Ferro was able to connect writing and photography in the construction of an image for the figure practically "invisible" of Salazar, as Jose Gil suggested, was well demonstrated, being inculcated in a collective imaginary that, despite all the political changes and the years that have yet to come, still shows the strength of a very effective visual propaganda. It would be Ferro, already as director of the Secretariat of National Propaganda, to create early a photographic archive in this state department, a service that would support the propaganda machine of the regime until its decline.
Revista de História da Arte W2, Jun 2015
The representation of human body in photography and the visual arts during the Ist quarter of the... more The representation of human body in photography and the visual arts during the Ist quarter of the 20th century and its influence in the work of Almada Negreiros
During the first decades of the 20th Century the status and the image
of women experienced a huge transformation. That transformation was visible through the public unveiling of some of her more intimate aspects, which until then were kept hidden from public eyes due to a strong moral censorship.
In the veil of the 20th Century the exposure of the woman body
assumed such importance that it filled the pages of the illustrated
press. Photography played a major role on this change due to its close partnership with illustrated media featuring the image of stage and screen artists creating a new form of relation with the public later known as “star system”.
A Portuguese portrait photographer, Silva Nogueira, dedicated part of his work to stage artists, as early as 1915, and through a process of complicity with artists like the Spanish-Italian singer and dancer Adria Rodi, started
a renewal in portrait practice introducing bold poses and expressions
that soon were adopted by Portuguese actresses. This boldness in photographic portrait had a strong impact on modernist artists, like Almada Negreiros, whose representation of the female body also overcame a major breakthrough.
From late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, Fotografia Brasil, a Lisbon commercial portraiture st... more From late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, Fotografia Brasil, a Lisbon commercial portraiture studio, led by
Joaquim da Silva Nogueira, photographed stage artists and introduced modernist practices in Portuguese photography,
still dominated by the late 19th-century taste. Lisbon was then a frequent stopover on the route to South America and,
especially, to Brazilian ports, and the work of Silva Nogueira benefited a lot from the posing sessions with foreign artists
that stopped over in Lisbon during their artistic tours. Since 1920, Fotografia Brasil had become the leading supplier
of artist portraits to the Portuguese illustrated press, eager of pictures from theatrical activity. The background of the
Fotografia Brasil photographic portraits activity may justify, for instance, the daring photo sessions with the Italian-born
dancer Adria Rodi, whose presentations in the Lisbon theatres called the attention of the popular magazine Ilustração
Portuguesa (August 1919). Adria Rodi’s audacious poses and Silva Nogueira’s modern photographic look surprised the
conservative Portuguese society. Photographs of other popular artists soon started to be regularly published in special
sections of illustrated magazine, face to face with international stars highlighting Silva Nogueira’s modern portraits.
Though most of the Portuguese stage artists called upon the services of Silva Nogueira throughout the fifty years of his
studio’s activity, it was during the 1920’s that he stood out establishing a special relationship with the actress, singer
and dancer Luísa Satanela, who played a key role in the transformation of the Portuguese theatrical scene. Satanela
introduced modernist design costumes, sceneries and dancing choreographies in the stage performances of revista, a
theatrical genre quite popular in Portugal. Silva Nogueira extensively portrayed Satanela in surprisingly modern photographic
series, innovating over and over, in an unusual complicity process, setting the pace for the decisive renewal of
the Portuguese photographic portrait activity, with emphasis on close-up and body image.
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Books by Paulo Ribeiro Baptista
This practice prefigured a situation of great modernity, closely connected with the renovation of the Portuguese theatre since most of the portraits taken by Silva Nogueira had actors and dancers as models.
ln this woy, we con look at this aesthetic renewal of the photographic portrait as one of the aspects that contributed to a paradigm shift in the representation of the human figure and his face, one of the aspects closely related to the renovotion of the stages, due to the influence of the cinema. Th1s wos precisely the cose of Silva Nogueira, who was also a film photographer and, in Portugal, first introduced a cinematographic lighting system in his studio.
Silva Nogueira's work had a great impact through the creative use of three-dimensionality, and his style became a reference for Portuguese photographers during the 1930s and 1940s.
The actress, singer and dancer Luísa Satanela, one of Portuguese vaudeville theatre stars of the 1920’s and 1930’s, innovated with a flamboyant style of short, glamorous and voluptuous costumes, with sequins and feathers, influenced by Hollywood. She contributed for the renewal of the Revista à Portuguesa, a vaudevillelike theatre genre. Satanela’s boldness turned her into one of the most controversial figures of her time. Many of those bold situations were captured by Silva Nogueira, a modern photographer, with a complicity that revealed their deep intuition about the empowerment of the actors’ image in the age of the illustrated magazines.
Papers by Paulo Ribeiro Baptista
foi uma das figuras mais importantes da fotografia portuguesa de oitocentos.
Fixando-se em Portugal na década de 1850, Fillon tornou o seu estabelecimento
fotográfico num dos mais destacados estúdios portugueses e tornar-se-ia numa
referência para as casas fotográficas portuguesas. Nele se fizeram fotografar as
mais importantes figuras da sociedade portuguesa do seu tempo, em particular
os membros da família real. A sua ligação aos meios teatrais, enquanto fotógrafo
do Teatro Nacional, trouxe-lhe enorme prestígio e muitas das fotografias de
artistas foram publicadas na revista O Contemporâneo.
During the first decades of the 20th Century the status and the image
of women experienced a huge transformation. That transformation was visible through the public unveiling of some of her more intimate aspects, which until then were kept hidden from public eyes due to a strong moral censorship.
In the veil of the 20th Century the exposure of the woman body
assumed such importance that it filled the pages of the illustrated
press. Photography played a major role on this change due to its close partnership with illustrated media featuring the image of stage and screen artists creating a new form of relation with the public later known as “star system”.
A Portuguese portrait photographer, Silva Nogueira, dedicated part of his work to stage artists, as early as 1915, and through a process of complicity with artists like the Spanish-Italian singer and dancer Adria Rodi, started
a renewal in portrait practice introducing bold poses and expressions
that soon were adopted by Portuguese actresses. This boldness in photographic portrait had a strong impact on modernist artists, like Almada Negreiros, whose representation of the female body also overcame a major breakthrough.
Joaquim da Silva Nogueira, photographed stage artists and introduced modernist practices in Portuguese photography,
still dominated by the late 19th-century taste. Lisbon was then a frequent stopover on the route to South America and,
especially, to Brazilian ports, and the work of Silva Nogueira benefited a lot from the posing sessions with foreign artists
that stopped over in Lisbon during their artistic tours. Since 1920, Fotografia Brasil had become the leading supplier
of artist portraits to the Portuguese illustrated press, eager of pictures from theatrical activity. The background of the
Fotografia Brasil photographic portraits activity may justify, for instance, the daring photo sessions with the Italian-born
dancer Adria Rodi, whose presentations in the Lisbon theatres called the attention of the popular magazine Ilustração
Portuguesa (August 1919). Adria Rodi’s audacious poses and Silva Nogueira’s modern photographic look surprised the
conservative Portuguese society. Photographs of other popular artists soon started to be regularly published in special
sections of illustrated magazine, face to face with international stars highlighting Silva Nogueira’s modern portraits.
Though most of the Portuguese stage artists called upon the services of Silva Nogueira throughout the fifty years of his
studio’s activity, it was during the 1920’s that he stood out establishing a special relationship with the actress, singer
and dancer Luísa Satanela, who played a key role in the transformation of the Portuguese theatrical scene. Satanela
introduced modernist design costumes, sceneries and dancing choreographies in the stage performances of revista, a
theatrical genre quite popular in Portugal. Silva Nogueira extensively portrayed Satanela in surprisingly modern photographic
series, innovating over and over, in an unusual complicity process, setting the pace for the decisive renewal of
the Portuguese photographic portrait activity, with emphasis on close-up and body image.
This practice prefigured a situation of great modernity, closely connected with the renovation of the Portuguese theatre since most of the portraits taken by Silva Nogueira had actors and dancers as models.
ln this woy, we con look at this aesthetic renewal of the photographic portrait as one of the aspects that contributed to a paradigm shift in the representation of the human figure and his face, one of the aspects closely related to the renovotion of the stages, due to the influence of the cinema. Th1s wos precisely the cose of Silva Nogueira, who was also a film photographer and, in Portugal, first introduced a cinematographic lighting system in his studio.
Silva Nogueira's work had a great impact through the creative use of three-dimensionality, and his style became a reference for Portuguese photographers during the 1930s and 1940s.
The actress, singer and dancer Luísa Satanela, one of Portuguese vaudeville theatre stars of the 1920’s and 1930’s, innovated with a flamboyant style of short, glamorous and voluptuous costumes, with sequins and feathers, influenced by Hollywood. She contributed for the renewal of the Revista à Portuguesa, a vaudevillelike theatre genre. Satanela’s boldness turned her into one of the most controversial figures of her time. Many of those bold situations were captured by Silva Nogueira, a modern photographer, with a complicity that revealed their deep intuition about the empowerment of the actors’ image in the age of the illustrated magazines.
foi uma das figuras mais importantes da fotografia portuguesa de oitocentos.
Fixando-se em Portugal na década de 1850, Fillon tornou o seu estabelecimento
fotográfico num dos mais destacados estúdios portugueses e tornar-se-ia numa
referência para as casas fotográficas portuguesas. Nele se fizeram fotografar as
mais importantes figuras da sociedade portuguesa do seu tempo, em particular
os membros da família real. A sua ligação aos meios teatrais, enquanto fotógrafo
do Teatro Nacional, trouxe-lhe enorme prestígio e muitas das fotografias de
artistas foram publicadas na revista O Contemporâneo.
During the first decades of the 20th Century the status and the image
of women experienced a huge transformation. That transformation was visible through the public unveiling of some of her more intimate aspects, which until then were kept hidden from public eyes due to a strong moral censorship.
In the veil of the 20th Century the exposure of the woman body
assumed such importance that it filled the pages of the illustrated
press. Photography played a major role on this change due to its close partnership with illustrated media featuring the image of stage and screen artists creating a new form of relation with the public later known as “star system”.
A Portuguese portrait photographer, Silva Nogueira, dedicated part of his work to stage artists, as early as 1915, and through a process of complicity with artists like the Spanish-Italian singer and dancer Adria Rodi, started
a renewal in portrait practice introducing bold poses and expressions
that soon were adopted by Portuguese actresses. This boldness in photographic portrait had a strong impact on modernist artists, like Almada Negreiros, whose representation of the female body also overcame a major breakthrough.
Joaquim da Silva Nogueira, photographed stage artists and introduced modernist practices in Portuguese photography,
still dominated by the late 19th-century taste. Lisbon was then a frequent stopover on the route to South America and,
especially, to Brazilian ports, and the work of Silva Nogueira benefited a lot from the posing sessions with foreign artists
that stopped over in Lisbon during their artistic tours. Since 1920, Fotografia Brasil had become the leading supplier
of artist portraits to the Portuguese illustrated press, eager of pictures from theatrical activity. The background of the
Fotografia Brasil photographic portraits activity may justify, for instance, the daring photo sessions with the Italian-born
dancer Adria Rodi, whose presentations in the Lisbon theatres called the attention of the popular magazine Ilustração
Portuguesa (August 1919). Adria Rodi’s audacious poses and Silva Nogueira’s modern photographic look surprised the
conservative Portuguese society. Photographs of other popular artists soon started to be regularly published in special
sections of illustrated magazine, face to face with international stars highlighting Silva Nogueira’s modern portraits.
Though most of the Portuguese stage artists called upon the services of Silva Nogueira throughout the fifty years of his
studio’s activity, it was during the 1920’s that he stood out establishing a special relationship with the actress, singer
and dancer Luísa Satanela, who played a key role in the transformation of the Portuguese theatrical scene. Satanela
introduced modernist design costumes, sceneries and dancing choreographies in the stage performances of revista, a
theatrical genre quite popular in Portugal. Silva Nogueira extensively portrayed Satanela in surprisingly modern photographic
series, innovating over and over, in an unusual complicity process, setting the pace for the decisive renewal of
the Portuguese photographic portrait activity, with emphasis on close-up and body image.
The Novaes brothers, Mário e Horácio, had a consistent photographic background. They were the sons of a reputed Lisbon’s photographic studio owner, Júlio Novaes. Although working separately, both shared the new values of modernist photography. The aesthetical changes they pursued were a major turn in Portuguese photographic scene that in early 1920’s kept attached to a Victorian taste in portraiture and to amateurish pictorial values in landscape and cityscape. They introduced substantial changes in Portuguese architectural photography practice. In aesthetical terms some of the more noticeable transformations to previous photography where the options to highlight structural lines, to reinforce graphical values with high contrast and to use dynamism through innovative frameworks in rupture with the conventional frontal gaze of traditional photography.
Novaes’ modern photography definitely contributed to the strong impact that modern architecture provoked in public, particularly through the illustrated magazines’ pages in ABC, Ilustração or Notícias Ilustrado. They gave a major contribution to show modern architecture in a modern way, expanding the effect those new buildings caused in the public. Their works had an important role to modernize Portuguese photographic practice and it influenced other Portuguese studios and photographers.
The photographic survey of Portuguese heritage, art and landscape partly published in A Arte e a Natureza em Portugal (The Art and Nature in Portugal) was the first Portuguese project that intended to carry on a systematic photographic recording and disclosure of heritage. It reveals an acute awareness of the need for an architectural, artistic, landscape and ethnographic heritage survey. The edition was published by the photography studio company Casa Biel in booklets since 1902. It was a long term project that began in the 1870’s and was carried on during the 1880’s and 1890’s. Part of those images was published previously as woodcut prints in O Occidente’s illustrated journal pages but later reprinted as collotypes to form the corpus of Biel’s work. This project was largely due to the partnership of a German-Portuguese photographer and entrepreneur, Emílio Biel and a Portuguese scholar, theorist and researcher on art and heritage, Joaquim de Vasconcelos, the scientific mentor of Casa Biel’s editorial activity.
In Biel’s Portuguese photographic survey we can find a principle similar to French’s Mission Heliographique’s, but it constituted an exclusively private initiative since the request for public funding was rejected by Portuguese authorities. The Casa Biel made at least two previous unsuccessful attempts to publish an heritage repertoire, during the 1880’s. It should also be pointed out that most of the photographic campaigns were conducted simultaneously with the survey of Portuguese’s railroads construction, commissioned to Biel’s firm. An indepth study of Biel’s work is possible today because we can follow chronologically the stages of his survey step by step through the prints of Biel’s photographs in O Occidente’s pages. Ultimately A Arte e a Natureza em Portugal can be regarded as a crucial contribution for the knowledge and study of Portuguese’s heritage.