Divulgando e promovendo uma colónia desconhecida

This paper analyses a sample of 138 photographs (121 original and seventeen duplicates) of the former Portuguese colony of Timor taken between the 1890s and the eve of the First World War, preserved in the Portuguese Centre of Photography and in the library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation or published in the press (illustrated magazines O Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) or as illustrated postcards. Using a semiotic and photojournalistic methodology and combining in the analysis photographic images with textual sources (parliamentary debates, military reports, press reports and written opinion of experts on overseas issues), this study shows how photography represented Timor and how this representation was presented in the metropolis. The imagetic sample indicates an eminently ethnographic and anthropological interest on the part of Portuguese photographers, who wanted to make up for the poor knowledge colonial decisionmakers in Lisbon had of that part of the empire. Still, there was an effort to promote Timor as a possible emigration destination through photographs that showed the domestication and Portugalisation of the territory or the agricultural and mineral potential of the colony. Thus, this paper contributes to historiographical debates on the use of photography as a primary source and the role of that technology in the imperial agendas of European nations in Africa and Asia

Colonialism · Emigration · Ethnography · Historiography · Photography · Portuguese · Representation (politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Indigenous Studies in Latin America