ABSTRACT
Most of the scant photographs of Fernando Pessoa have acquired mythical iconic proportions. One finds them everywhere, in books about Pessoa and his life, as illustrations for other books, as covers for magazines - either in simple reproduction or altered through cropping or other Selective, enhancing techniques, and especially on the internet. The one photograph of those early years that stands out for me, however, is one that shows Pessoa aged six sitting on a tricycle. The way it usually gets reproduced, cropped on all sides, lends it even the air of the unstudied capture of childhood and the use of a toy as prop appears much more natural than the various rocks and tree stumps commonly used as studio platforms in other images. A limitation of seeing that Soares contemplates is the difficulty of ever seeing oneself as one is, or as others see one, that is, of seeing one as if one could be other than oneself.
