BUALA

Photography in Mozambique was a great collective adventure for about two decades. It was defined by a few books, which, as a rule, were an extension of exhibits and gestures of international cooperation (Moçambique, A Terra e os Homens, 1983; Karingana ua Karingana, 1990; Maputo - Desenrascar a vida, 1997; Iluminando Vidas, 2002). When Europe discovered photography made by Africans, a few years back, Mozambique was in the front line (Africa, Africa, Copenhagen, 1993; Revue Noire, n. º 15, Paris, 1994). With life slowly turning normal in Mozambique (after the revolution and the civil war, after the election of 1994, or 1999…), the chapter of mobilization and propaganda that had called for photography headed to its natural demise and the routes forcibly turned personal. There had been some exceptions, such as José Henriques da Silva, with Pescadores Macua (Lisbon, 1983 and 1998) and Moira Forajaz with Muitipi, Ilha de Moçambique (Lisbon, 1983).

Maputo, 1990, auto-portrait with his children

The aforementioned adventure had trailblazers, Ricardo Rangel and Kok Nam, who came very soon into a colonial press that was more permissive that the one based in Lisbon and who set the models for the transition. More than some Portuguese tradition (Século Ilustrado?), the exciting example of the photographers of Drum magazine, in South Africa, must have made an impact. The adventure then had its headquarters and school, the Associação Moçambicana de Fotografia [Mozambican Association of Photography] and the Centro de Formação Fotográfica [Photography Learning Centre], in which dozens of photographers were trained, some of them more perseverant than others. It had a documental and political style, as a way to answer to the urgencies of socialism, war, hunger and the reconstruction. Times changed.

José Cabral came to this collective history in a unique way, having trained with his father amateur photographer and filmmaker — he also had a homonymous grandfather, on his father’s side, who was a governor (1910-1938) and who had a park  named after him in the old capital Lourenço Marques (Continuadores Park, today). He started in cinematography and he joined his experience as a news photographer to documental programmes of a less urgent nature. Later, he was probably the first to distance himself from the routines of journalism, and he made that challenge very clear with the choice of works in display in the Iluminando Vidas exhibit: instead of war, misery, victims, ruins and promises of reconstruction, that can still be seen yet another face for exoticism, he showed feminine nudes without any ethnographical pretext. The representation encountered some problems in the Bamako Rencontres (2003, Mali), photographical capital in a country of Islamic severity.

Maputo, 2002 [monumento a Mouzinho de Albuquerque]His photography — particularly the fact that he shows it as the work of an artist — became more autobiographical and even more intimate, albeit free from any pretence to self-reference or narcissism. In the country’s new situation of economic growth, that is a battle that matters, a more individualist battle for convivial spaces. As Linhas da Minha Mão [The lines of my hand], in 2006, during the third edition of Photofesta, was an affirmation of the personal dimension of a gallery of portraits and places — meetings with people, landscapes, cities and trees all through Mozambique’s recent history.
His Urban Angels are children: his own three and then four children and other people’s street children. The differences of colour and of social condition aren’t hidden, quite the opposite, they make the record of the unbearable inequalities more pungent and penetrating. José Cabral’s images are simple and beautiful, tender and terrible, but they always lack the weightings of chance, artifice and policy that so often are the easy formula of the art of photography. They are simultaneously direct and charged with emotion, without distancing themselves from life in search of metaphors. There’s a personal history and many collective histories in these images of Mozambique. One of them brings together General Mouzinho de Albuquerque, who defeated Gunganhana/Ngungunhane  in 1895, and the great-grandson of Colonel José Cabral, who had continued his railways plans and comissioned a statue of him - which has meanwhile gone down. It his just a family photograph, a child playing…

Published in the catalogue of the exibithion “Urban Angels /Anjos Urbanos”, de José Cabral, Galeria P4 Photography, Lisbon, May 2009.

by Alexandre Pomar
Cara a cara | 28 May 2010 | José Cabral, mozambique, photography