Work by photographer Artur Pastor on rural Portugal collected in a book
After having been the subject of a large retrospective exhibition in 2014 in Lisbon, which gave rise to a digital catalog, an initiative of the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, in partnership with the Lisbon City Council (CML), through the Municipal Archive from Lisbon, gave rise to this co-edition on paper in the field of photography.
Directed and executive coordinated by Isabel Corda, the book has texts by Ana Saraiva, António Araújo, Artur Pastor, Cristiana Bastos, Isabel Corda, Luís Pavão, Marcos Fernandes and Maria Carlos Raditch, in a total of 205 pages where dozens of images fit. from the author of a vast repository of historical images of the rural country.
As a technician at the service of the Ministry of Agriculture, Artur Pastor covered the entire territory, so his work covers mainland Portugal and islands, in a portrait considered “absolutely unique of the country and its people”, young a press release of the foundation on the launch of the book.
Over the years, first as an amateur and then as a ministry technician, Pastor mapped the territory from north to south, traveled and captured the profile of its coast, interior and islands, getting to know the people who worked in the work of the sea and without shaping the fields.
“He did so with such zeal and dedication that they can only be explained by a deep love for Portugal and its people”, emphasize the text on the catalogue, recalling that the Teul author poetically witnesses the tuna fish in the sea. do Algarve, object of the first works, dated from 1943 to 1945, and carried out at the age of 20, when he was serving in the military in Tavira.
“Already fast, they dye the sea of sudden apparitions, only to take refuge in fear at the bottom of the net”, it was in this way that Artur Pastor described an activity that has interested many artists and writers throughout the ages.
During his lifetime, Artur Pastor published two books, one about Nazaré (1958) and the other about the Algarve (1965), which have long been out of print and are considered bibliographical rarities, but a large part of his collections already discussed can be consulted in open access. There is also a documentary produced in 2014, “The landscape of Artur Pastor”, as well as information and images on the website ´online´ https://arturpastor.tumblr.com/.
The collection created by Artur Pastor, composed of a typical negative with images of a documentary and artistic nature, was preserved in a background with historical, sociological and ethnographic point of view.
In 2001, CML acquired the estate of Artur Pastor, which is, since these data, one of the most requested of all the collections of the Municipal Archive of Lisbon, whether for the reproduction of images or for carrying out explorations in various parts of the country, having passed, namely, in Nazaré, Alter do Chão, Beja, Évora, Braga, Tavira, Albufeira, Sesimbra, among others, in Portugal, and recently in Lublin, in Poland.
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