Title: Ensaios em preto e branco: arquivo, memória e cidade nas fotografias de Ricardo Rangel
Abstract: thesis focuses on the production of the Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel (1924-2009).The period analyzed encompasses the so-called late-colonial period , which is intertwined, along the chapters, with other temporalities, in order to bring present and past together.The archives and the photographs are thought as privileged interlocutors, from which it is possible to glimpse tensions and negotiations about the city and the memories it holds.The thesis has three main axes: the archive, seen as a place of contestation and dispute; the intellectual generation of the 1940s, in which I analyze Rangel's trajectory, his field of artistic and political action, the context of the production of his images and his socio-cultural engagements as aspects that form and inform his gaze; and the photographs, assembled together in order to think about how they articulate with each other and how they make up what I call a photographic experience.The city of Lourenço Marques/Maputo is also a central character in this thesis, which permeates across the three analytical axes.Its streets, houses, buildings and monuments are taken as material and symbolic capacitors through which to reflect issues of archive, memory and photography.To that extent, Ricardo Rangel's context of production and performance, along with his photographic collection, are problematized in order to understand what are the potentials of the photographer's work in the construction of a memory of the late colonial period in Mozambique and what are its uses in the present.