tipologia de um retrato

Tese de mestrado, Pintura, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2012Photography being a recent form of expression has inherited a vast majority of its principles from painting. Although painters from the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth centuries mistrusted photography, it articulates and meets in painting the most part of its foundations. While, from the ‘technological’ point of view, photography has introduced other mediums, we wish to think over it as a mean of artistic expression deeply connected to painting from the perspective of its representation and composition processes and from the standpoint of the themes they address, such as the portrait. The portrait is, unquestionably, one of painting’s archetypes and it is obviously one of the most important heritages photography has received. We may ascertain that the importance of the portrait derives from the fact that the human being is built around a defining nest of affections; the portrait always shows itself as a replacement for the subject. Since the inception of photography in 1827 with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the “carte-de-visite”, being the basis for the portrait collections, was one of the first patented photographic processes, back in 1854 by André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. The importance of the portrait both in History and Art History is unquestionable. Because we are human beings, condemned by the limits of time, we hold an intrinsic desire to hold, preserve and try to retain what is not eternal; the others. Within the wide scope of portrait, the family portrait has been exploited the most by artists. This is the niche where the series Memória do Tempo wishes to fit. In light of the history of portrait in the two-dimensional surface of the picture, and relating to other artists’ work, we deeply analyse both formally and conceptually, the set of chosen photographs; specifically focusing the concepts of time, narration, series, double-representation, picture-in-picture, fragmented construction and self-representatio