The mask of Salazar and other photographs

A history of what could have been

Abstract

Throughout his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin claims it is mandatory for the historical materialist to arrest time, to seize the past and to detach it from the “homogeneous, empty time” of progress (2007, p. 261). The historical object would be, then, the time of this immobilization of the past that “blast[s] open the continuum of history” (ibid., p. 262). In this essay, I propose a tour between three photographs, read here as dialectical images capable of condensing past, present and future in a unique instant. Through their analysis, I suggest that we draw ruptures in the temporal line of progress and that we imagine a new montage of history. Our starting point is a photo of the Monument to the Discoveries, in Lisbon, in 1960, during the 5^th centenary of the death of Henry the Navigator. Then, I will analyze photographs of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro taken in indigenous communities in the 1980s and of Carlos Vergara shot in Rio de Janeiro’s street carnival during the 1970s. In the past fixed in those images, in the suspended time of the photographs, this essay will search for breaches from which to build an alternative future.