Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Photographic Colonial Agency: The Work of Agostiniano de Oliveira at the Diamang (1948–1966)

2023; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_15

2635-1641

Nuno Porto,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Article 22 of the working contract for the white employees of the Diamonds Company of Angola expressly prohibited the possession of photographic cameras within the diamond mining concession area. The company lived under a visual blackout. As much as for any other activity within the company’s territorial limits, to photograph, to film, to record, was a surveilled and disciplined task assigned to specific subjects, and designed to maximise performance and profit for the company’s stockholders. In this chapter, I return to the materials of the Diamonds Company of Angola to explore a couple of moments on which photography was part of forms of resistance to the contractual blackout. Moments where photographs were neither documents nor truthful records, and became, in time, grim comments on colonial imagination.