Tarrafal

GOST Books, 2024

284 pages | $80.00

João Pina’s new book, Tarrafal, joins a lineage of documentary projects that mine archives and family history to challenge the silence of past atrocities. It bears witness to the horrific years of António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist rule in Portugal and its colonies, focusing on the infamous concentration camp established in 1936 on the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde. Known as Tarrafal, it was where Portuguese political and social rebels and dissidents were sent. Inspired by the Nazi camps, its intent was to annihilate Portuguese and African opponents of the Salazar dictatorship. Prisoners were tortured, starved, and forced to perform intense physical labor under the hot West African sun until they were released or died. 

Pina’s grandfather, Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, was one of those political prisoners sent to Tarrafal in 1949. 

Pina, a Portuguese documentary photographer known for his work on war, conflict, and human rights began working on this personal project in 2019 after opening a shoebox of family relics: photographs, negatives, contact sheets, and letters exchanged between his grandfather and great grandfather, Luiz Alves de Carvalho. Among the photographs were ones taken by his great grandparents, when in 1949 they were inexplicitly allowed to visit their son in Tarrafal. They brought their camera to photograph their son and his fellow prisoners, with the intent to share those images with fellow family members, unknowingly creating an extraordinary historical record.

These straightforward portraits of the prisoners anchor the book. They are the first images we see: strong, unbowed, defiant men willing to risk freedom to fight fascism. Their presence and their political voices resonate throughout the book. 

Tarrafal is less a conventional photobook than a dialogue with the past, a reckoning with the afterlife of colonialism and fascism. It is both intensely personal and rigorously political. The story of Tarrafal remains relatively unknown—Google it and the images that pop up are of beautiful beaches and clear blue water—so the book functions as witness, evidence, and memory. Pina interweaves letters and telegrams between his grandfather and great grandfather, other written artifacts and historical images with his current photographs of tourist Tarrafal and relics of the camp’s site, now the Resistance Museum. 

This layered structure—interlacing the familial and the national, the intimate and the systemic—works because Pina exercises restraint. He allows history to reveal itself through the letters and other written documents. His present-day photographs are quiet and contemplative with a subdued color palette and deliberate compositions. His mages of ferry passengers, beautiful beaches, gorgeous light, and serene landscapes stand in stark contrast to his photographs, rendered with forensic precision, of the place itself with its crumbling walls, rusted locks, and the traces of human suffering. Still life images of prisoner artifacts such as a carved elephant, a violin, and chess pieces the prisoners made from bread, extend the emotional range of his work. Pina shows us how images of absence can speak as powerfully as images of presence. 

One of the most remarkable and haunting sequences lies at its center. Double gatefolds open to panoramic spreads of Herculana Carvalhjo (Pina’s great grandmother) placing flowers on the graves of the 32 political prisoners who died in the camp between 1936 and 1948. Her dance-like gestures and occasional sly glances at the camera read as contemporary performance art, an improvised collaboration between photographer and performer that transforms mourning into resistance.

Mixing text and photographs can enhance both and this book does that extremely well, particularly in the current day letters that Pina writes to both his grandfather and great grandfather, mirroring the letters they wrote to each other. He introduces himself and his life, inquires about their activities and wonders what their opinions would be about current political events. He writes that he started this project “…in the hope of getting to know you a bit better and learning something from what you teach us through your fight.” 

Pina even tracks down some of the living prisoners from Tarrafal. These interviews and photographs complete the time axis and reminds us again of what photography does well. It reaches back into history and forces us to confront realities that we would prefer to forget. These memories of Tarrafal have a particularly urgent feel today as right-wing politics and fascist tendencies are on the ascendency across the Western world. Tarrafal stands as both a testament and a warning that what was buried can still speak, and that silence, once broken, carries the force of truth.

— Review by Michelle Bogre

Michelle Bogre, Professor Emerita, Parsons School of Design, is a teacher, copyright lawyer, documentary photographer and author of four books: Photography As Activism: Images for Social Change, Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century, Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice, and The Routledge Companion to Copyright and Creativity in the 21st Century. She regularly lectures, writes and teaches workshops on copyright and photography. Her photographs and/or writings have been published in books, including the Time-Life Annual Photography series, The Family of Women, Beauty Bound, The Design Dictionary and photographer Trey Ratcliffe’s monograph, Light Falls like Bits. She is currently trying to finish a long term documentary project on family farms, published on Instagram as @thefarmstories.