Family Albums

People are the most important. Without them there would be no "family albums". The photographs presented in this book are inseparable from the women and men, with names and surnames, who shared their intimacy, thoughts, and life stories. Also, their knowledge and creativity. The people featured in these pages offer a powerful testimony of self-representation of the African diaspora in Portugal, with images and words, in the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the Independence of African Portuguese-speaking countries. With essays on the African diasporas in Portugal and in the "Black Atlantic" and their relationships with photography and visual culture by Filipa Lowndes Vicente, Inocência Mata and Aurora Almada e Santos.

"Family photographs are the evidence, history and memory of ‘normal’ life, of ordinary everyday existence, of human subjectivity and individuality. They are individual or group portraits, collective celebrations or trivial details of domestic intimacy. Family albums are made of personal histories, a repository of emotions, visible in the images, as well as of pain, not visible in the images - and they are always objects simultaneously belonging to past and present. To the past in which the photographs were taken, to the present in which they remain alive for those who have a relationship with them and in whom they prompt emotions, memories and a variety of feelings."
Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inocência Mata, Introduction