QUANDO O TEMPO RESCENDE : A OBRA DE JOSÉ CATELA

This article proposes that José Neves Catela, Macanese by choice, constructs, through intimately ordered photographs, a discourse on Macao in which memory is not linearity but a chain of affections that transforms image into historical testimony. Through an iconographic and contextual reading, Antón...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Review of Culture
Main Author: António Conceição Júnior
Format: Articles
Published: Instituto Cultural de Macau July 2002
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Online Access:https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40003/2679
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Summary:This article proposes that José Neves Catela, Macanese by choice, constructs, through intimately ordered photographs, a discourse on Macao in which memory is not linearity but a chain of affections that transforms image into historical testimony. Through an iconographic and contextual reading, António Conceição Júnior analyzes the work as a methodical record of the gaze upon the Other and upon daily life, which privileges public and intimate scenes and reveals a hybrid Macao between the traditional countryside and the city, between Portuguese tradition and Chinese modernity. Unlike abstract poetic readings in the style of Cartier-Bresson, Catela's work dissolves boundaries, exhibiting an irretrievable time that crystallizes in small photographs gathered in an album. The article discusses the museological and ethical function of dissemination by the Macao Museum of Art, which transforms the sharing of these images into a gesture of patrimonial devotion and of resistance to non-exclusion. Through references to transcontinental photographers (Beato, Thomson, Nani), the study situates Catela within a rare genealogy of documentation that captures rituals, bazaars, itinerant trades, and the everyday life of a Macao in transition, anticipating globalization. It concludes that Catela's images offer, with high historical value, a sensitive, complex, and politically significant memory of the city.
ISSN:1682-1106