The war bodies: photography and memory of ex-combatants mutilated in the Colonial War

Abstract

Veterans of the Portuguese Colonial War are back on the media agenda through the project “Despojos de Guerra” (Spoils of War), by Portuguese photojournalist Leonel de Castro. The project brings to the present time the scars of the veterans, as well as their life stories, through current portraits and individual memories. The photographs, Using a collodion process, analogic, photographs present veterans and the marks of the wounds that interrupted their lives in their youth. Thus, this study intends to reflect on the constitution of memories of war mutilation through documentary photography and how these memories dialogue with present time. It is based on a qualitative analysis of the photodocumentary discourse and of the discourse of the creator of the project, Leonel de Castro, collected in an interview, in the light of a theoretical referential built from the contributions of Sontag, Costa, Baeza, Barthes and Kossoy, who discuss the uses of documentary photography, and of Biondi, about the representation of pain and suffering in photojournalism. The research proposes two categories of analysis of the photographic images of Despojos de Guerra, in which material and temporal natures complement each other. Conclusions point out the ideas that documentary photography allows memories of old facts to remain present through their materialization in images and, furthermore, that photographer’s choices of the constitutive elements of the photographic image are fundamental for a certain message to be transmitted. The analysis of the images, therefore, must consider the relations between such elements.