Through the Lens of Memory: Photo Topographies of a Concentration Camp

Join AFS for a conversation with photographer João Pina, who will discuss his latest book project, "Tarrafal."

In 1936, in the small village of Tarrafal in Cape Verde (what was then a Portuguese colony of the coast of West Africa), a concentration camp was built by direct order of the Portuguese dictator Antonio Oliveira Salazar, to send political prisoners into what became known as the "camp of slow death." Earlier that year, Salazar had sent a government official to Germany to visit and learn from Hitler’s regime on how camps were being built. In 1949, Pina's grandfather, Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, a young communist militant, was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted special permission to visit their son and photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who died in the camp.

Now, more than 70 years later, Pina recovers his own family archive and other historical archives that show the camp in that era, and produces his own photographic work.

Program in African Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Brazil Lab, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

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