Human condition
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 nototious exceptions, such as José Henriques da Silva with Pescadores Macua (Lisbon, 1983 and 1998) and Moira Forjaz with Muitipi, Ilha de Moçambique (Lisbon, 1983).
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 amateur photographer and
filmmaker father — he also had a grandfather, homonymous, on his
father’s side, who was a governor (1910-1938) and who had a park
named after him in the old capital (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 Bamako, Mali, photographical capital in a country of Islamic
severity.
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.
The Urban Angels are
children: his own three and then four and other people’s children,
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
associates General Mouzinho de Albuquerque, who defeated Gunganhana
in 1895, to Colonel José Cabral’s great-grandson, who had
continued his plans for rail tracks and who made a statue to him,
which has meanwhile gone down. It is just a family photograph, a
child playing…
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