Ether. Un laboratório de fotografia e historia

Ether / marked the photographic culture in Portugal in the 1980s and 1990s. It was structured as an association, organized exhibitions and problems that have embodied new looks and discourses. The collection, inventory and critical reading carried out by Susana Lourenço Marques allows us to understand her eclectic program and the way in which the indispensable foundations were established for the recognition of a valuable heritage of historical references. Throughout its thirteen years of activity, between 1982 and 1994, twenty-seven exhibitions were held that broadened the relationship between photography, film, drawing, painting and literature. This book covers those exhibitions that recover the photographic heritage from the 1930s to the 1960s, rediscovering names that were then forgotten and fundamental today, such as Victor Palla and Costa Martins, Gérard Castello-Lopes, Antonio Sena da Silva, Carlos Afonso Dias or Carlos Calvet. and presenting a new generation of authors such as Daniel Blaufuks or Augusto Alves da Silva. This journey culminated in the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography with two retrospective synthesis of the history of photography in Portugal, where the basis for the seminal work of Antonio Sena, the history of the photographic image in Portugal, was forged. This book is not a mere account of this history, and it constructs a singular view on this space of production, formation and circulation of photography. This reveals its protagonists, but above all an effective relationship with photographic images, discovered in their formats of choice: exhibitions and books.