DOURO DOS FOTÓGRAFOS (DOURO OF THE PHOTOGRAPHERS) is a project marking the 20th anniversary of the Douro’s classification as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and funded by the 2022 Cultural Agents Support Programme (DRCN). It is a collaborative project between Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo and Casa da Imagem – Manuel Leão Foundation.
We started with a process of historical research, comparing the photography of Domingos Alvão, Mário Novais, Artur Pastor and Teófilo Rego in order to reveal an innovative perspective on the themes and languages shared by the authors. The discovery in Teófilo Rego’s photographic archive of 564 negatives commissioned by Sandeman brought the possibility of revealing and disseminating unpublished images of the Douro, in black and white and colour, which took on greater prominence in the research and allowed, along with the artistic residency carried out by a group of students from ESAP’s Visual Arts-Photography degree, a real approach to the archive as a hypothesis for creating contemporary artistic proposals, materialised in the exhibition “Dupla Exposição” and the publication Rota 222, presented at the event Images of the Douro Round Table.
