What cannot be seen: "O que elas viram, o que nós vemos. Fotógrafas amadoras em Portugal, 1860–1920"

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DATE

12 Jan 2026

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Augusto

What cannot be seen: "O que elas viram, o que nós vemos. Fotógrafas amadoras em Portugal, 1860–1920"

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Augusto

“The gesture that underpins this exhibition is, in itself, a corrective act. By bringing together and publicly presenting the works of Margarida Relvas, Mariana Relvas, and Maria da Conceição de Lemos Magalhães, the curatorial team intervenes in a narrative traditionally marked by the omission of female contributions, seeking to reinsert these authors into the panorama of Portuguese photography, between late Romanticism and the height of Pictorialism.”

Since the mid-19th century, photography has slowly established itself as a new language, oscillating between technique and art, between documentation and intimacy, between public space and private refuge. In its first phase, photographic culture in Portugal was mainly rooted in the studio, in urban and rural representation, in the fixation of the bourgeois portrait, and in domestic albums that began to replace, as memory devices, the old painted miniatures. The camera thus became an ambiguous instrument, simultaneously a recording machine and an apparatus for symbolic construction, capable of sedimenting identities, consolidating statuses, and crystallizing a view of society and the world. It is in this context that the exhibition que elas viram, o que nós vemos. Fotógrafas amadoras em Portugal, 1860–1920 (What They Saw, What We See: Amateur Women Photographers in Portugal, 1860–1920) emerges, associated with the research project WOMENPHOT.PT, whose stated objective is to recover, from the silence of history, the presence of women who photographed in a field largely dominated by men.

The gesture that underpins this exhibition is, in itself, a corrective act. By bringing together and publicly presenting the works of Margarida Relvas, Mariana Relvas, and Maria da Conceição de Lemos Magalhães, the curatorial team intervenes in a narrative traditionally marked by the omission of female contributions, seeking to reinsert these authors into the panorama of Portuguese photography, between late Romanticism and the height of Pictorialism. This is a necessary gesture, not only for reasons of historical repositioning, but also for the importance of continuing to question the very understanding of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century visual culture, which remains incomplete as long as a partial history, filtered by criteria of gender, privilege, and institutional visibility, continues to be reproduced.

The volume of images gathered—approximately one hundred and thirty prints in the exhibition presented at Casa Marta Ortigão Sampaio, expanded to approximately two hundred in the presentation at MNAC-MC—is organized along a path that spans from nineteenth-century Romanticism to the pictorialist experiments of the early twentieth century. Portraits, landscapes, domestic interiors, rural and maritime motifs predominate, genres that, both then and now, are strongly shaped by aesthetic conventions and a particular hegemonic worldview. The repetition of poses, framing, and scenic devices—the house, the garden, the countryside—constructs an imaginary world clearly softened by formal harmony, by the search for a kind of serenity through composition, by the domestication and idealization of reality.

It is precisely at this point that the critical ambition of the exhibition deserves to be considered. If, on the one hand, it rescues names and works that had remained in the shadows, on the other—and because it seems pertinent to me—it might be possible to interrogate, in a more incisive way, the social, technical, and symbolic conditions that made the photographic practice of these women possible—aspects and frameworks that, if a fair recovery is sought, seem necessary to consider. The genealogy of the authors unequivocally reveals the centrality of privilege. Margarida and Mariana are descended from the family of Carlos Relvas, a tutelary figure of 19th-century Portuguese photography, owner of one of the most celebrated studios in the country, a space for the circulation of technical knowledge, institutional legitimation, and artistic sociability. Maria da Conceição, on the other hand, was part of a restricted social circle that ensured her access to equipment, technical training, and international dissemination networks. The term "amateurs," used in their time, should not obscure this fundamental fact: they were women from economically privileged backgrounds, whose social standing allowed them to transform a cultivated pastime into a more consistent artistic practice. Throughout the 19th century, the category of amateur photographer situated women's experience of photography in the private sphere, associating it with moral formation, domestic education, and the affirmation of a certain social status. Photography was learned at home, through family transmission, informal instruction, and direct observation of teachers—fathers, husbands, brothers. However, this private sphere was not a neutral space: it was traversed by class values, gender expectations, and regimes of visibility that delimited what could or could not be seen, shown, or published—and this seems equally important to contextualize and problematize as we explore the exhibition.

In the case of Margarida Relvas, the extremely early start to her photographic practice—she began photographing as a child in her father's studio in Golegã—exemplifies, in an almost paradigmatic way, this domestic learning as a path to creation. Between portraits, still lifes, and later, landscapes of central and northern Portugal, the young photographer built a body of work that would be published in illustrated periodicals and presented in international exhibitions. Her insertion into this circuit reveals not only proven talent and aesthetic sensitivity but also the effectiveness of a social and cultural network that favored visibility. The abandonment of photography after marriage, in turn, highlights the limits often experienced and imposed on the continuity of female creation, even in exceptional contexts.

Mariana Relvas later joined this same world. Daughter and second wife of Carlos Relvas, Margarida and Mariana shared the surname and the studio, but not the same path. Both, however, illustrate how amateur photography, understood as a practice of social training and distinction, functioned as a possible space for artistic expression for women, within a regime of possibilities that was simultaneously broad and restricted.

Maria da Conceição de Lemos Magalhães, on the other hand, stands out for the consistency and experimentation in her work, which is deeply marked by pictorialism. The photographs presented in the exhibition primarily explore rural and maritime themes—from agricultural work in Moreira da Maia to the landscapes of Costa Nova—through chromatic shifts and tonal variations in the compositions. Although the pictorialist aesthetic moves away from documentary recording, opting for a poetic construction of the image closer to naturalist painting, it is also important to recognize that, even within these conventions, there is a documentary value: the portraits, landscapes, and interiors reveal habits, clothing, lifestyles, and everyday gestures that also constitute a source for understanding Portuguese society, making it possible to see something beyond aesthetic codification in these images.

The photographs gathered in this exhibition constitute, in fact, a rare testimony of women's artistic practice in a time of profound inequalities in access to the means of cultural production, and, in this sense, the exhibition fulfills the role of restoring memory. However, the absence of any explicit problematization of the social conditions that sustained these practices reveals the limitations of a recovery that, although necessary, seems to me to remain partially filtered or, at least, not very in-depth.

Perhaps, in these rediscoveries, it is necessary to interrogate more directly the relationship between gender, class, and representation (?). The images presented are in accordance with the aesthetic language of the time, but—I cannot help but reflect—they also portray a world shaped by a bourgeois sensibility, where work emerges as an aestheticized theme and landscape as a space for contemplation—only those with significant economic resources could regularly own photographic equipment. Cameras, glass plates, developing chemicals, photographic paper, and setting up a home darkroom represented high costs, and this is important to remember.

Perhaps the greatest merit of the exhibition lies in this dual movement: on the one hand, it aims to open archives, to reinscribe erased female presences; on the other, it makes visible the very structural inequality that shaped the production of these images. For a rewriting to be truly transformative, however, it is necessary that the critical gaze not be content with nostalgia and formal beauty. It is necessary to consider the mechanisms of exclusion, that memory does not erase the context. Showing what they saw also implies asking under what conditions they saw it, what they were allowed to see, and how they challenged and influenced gender norms. And to remember that what we see is also the possible fragment, the fruit of a patriarchal and unequal society.

Visibility, in itself, does not automatically equate to restitution, and there is a critical responsibility on the part of those who, today, observe these images in the light of other sensibilities, other struggles, other consciousnesses. Seeing the past should not only serve to comfort the present, but to question it. And to question it not only on an aesthetic and technical level, but on a political, social, and symbolic level. What they saw is definitely different from what we see today.

The exhibition can be visited until February 1, 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Maria Inês Augusto, 34, has a degree in Art History. She worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in the Educational Services department as a trainee and for 9 years at the Palácio do Correio Velho as an appraiser and cataloguer of works of art and collecting. She took part in the Postgraduate Programme in Art Markets at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa as a guest lecturer for several editions and collaborated with BoCA - Bienal de Artes Contemporâneas in 2023. She is currently working on an Art Advisory and curatorial project, collaborating with Teatro do Vestido in production assistance and has been producing different types of text.

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