ABSTRACT
The French photographer Céline Gaille explains in this chapter how she created a photography book with anonymous photographs and documents she herself collected in Lisbon, following an unpredictable mental process: her own recollection of unknown lives. Accept it, a Portuguese Album 1919–1979 questions the photo-novel or the documentary-fiction as well as the picture editing or the making of a carnet de voyage. The author places her medium at the forefront of a literary construction while she explores the sentiment of loss through the story of a Portuguese family, full of secrets, split between two shores of the Atlantic Ocean during the dictatorship. The viewer/reader is confronted with a family album manipulated and created from scratch by the author. As an artist, Céline Gaille chose to work around the silence that covers the crash of a lost world; the end of Salazar’s dictatorship and the fall of the Portuguese empire, a direct consequence of the violent colonial wars in Africa, muzzled the individual memories and blurred the collective memory, despite the change of regime in 1974. The processes at hand are concerned with the holding of something to collective memory, Portugal’s first and foremost, but also European.
