Aspetos da afirmação da cultura visual em Portugal: o papel de António Ferro. Da Ilustração Portuguesa ao arquivo fotográfico do SPN

Abstract

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.