Carlos Gil, the revolutionary photojournalist who fell into oblivion – Life

Carlos Gil (1937-2001) was more than a photographer of the 25th of April 1974. He was a war reporter, a portraitist of individuals and collectives and a storyteller. For four decades he captured a world in revolution, with emphasis on those that took place in Portugal. But in recent years, his name has been forgotten to the detriment of other photojournalists who were his contemporaries. With the extended reissue of Carlos Gil – A Photographer in the Revolution (via Caminho), with texts by Adelino Gomes, his son, Daniel Cortesão Gil, hopes to continue consolidating his father’s legacy and making his work known to new audiences.

Carlos Gil was born in Mortágua in 1937. He graduated in Law in Coimbra – where he met a young José Afonso – and then went to Timor where he was on a service commission. It was on his way to that island that, during a brief stop in Singapore, he bought his first camera. It was in Timor that he began photographing, without any formal training. Returning to Lisbon, he managed to join the ranks of the extinct The capital and there began his career as a journalist. He was a reporter and photojournalist, two conditions that he would accumulate for the rest of his life, says his son.

Daniel Gil highlights several times that his father was an “extremely well-informed” person and committed not only to aesthetics, but also to his values ​​and that this permeated all of his work.

The communications specialist believes that his father is less remembered than the other photographers who photographed the 25th of April simply for the sake of longevity. “Of the great people who photographed that day, only my father is not alive and as it is up to me to take care of his estate, it all depends a little on my intervention”, he explains to SATURDAY.

On the day of the Revolution, Carlos Gil was surprised at dawn. A phone call woke him up and told him to take the camera and go to the street because something important was happening: “Carlos, get up, listen to the radio and go out. Take your camera, it’s there the Revolution”, he recalled in a text published on the 20th anniversary of the 25th of April. The identity of the caller was never revealed, although the curtain was briefly lifted by the widow a few years ago (“On the other end of the line was a neighbor of the building”, widow Maria Judite told Public in 2018).

During that day, Gil fired hundreds of shots, between Praça do Comércio and Largo do Carmo. Journalists, soldiers, young and old, in color and black and white. “He wasn’t ready for that day and had to ask professional colleagues for photographic rolls”, recalls his son.

The book opens with a photograph of Salazar shortly before his death. The album title A Photographer in the Revolution refers not only to his work on the 25th of April, but to the entire revolution that preceded and followed this political and social transition. “The 25th of April is a process. Historians, journalists, everyone who thinks about the subject, inevitably have to tell what it was like in the past”, highlights Daniel Gil. And the order in which the photographs are presented tells exactly (one) the story. “I had the help of a great journalist [Adelino Gomes] who lived on the 25th of April and is probably one of the greatest living journalists” and who helped put together the narrative.

Among the pre-25 de Abril photographs and of PREC and its protagonists, there are dozens of photographs of popular people, musicians and other artists spread across the country. A photograph that Daniel Gil highlights is that of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho in Caxias prison, during the FP-25 trial. “My father even had his phone tapped after this photograph that was taken in absentia. He joined a delegation of Brazilian deputies who went to see Othello in place of one who had fallen ill. He took a small camera and did this photograph showing Captain de Abril arrested.”

One thing that is very clear in this album is that those photographed felt at ease with the photographer. From an aged Vergílio Ferreira riding a bicycle in Fontanelas, to a Fernando Pessa photographed in a bathtub full of foam or two generals of the revolution photographed in their advanced age, there are several photographs that show protagonists of the last 50 years of the country of so it’s rare to see them. There are also photographs in the privacy of José Afonso’s house, with his family in the distance, or of Isabel do Carmo on the day she returned home after serving a prison sentence.

“Most of these photographs are not in public moments, they are in private moments, more intimate, more of personal relationships. It doesn’t mean that he was friends with all of these people, but he had an almost romantic vision and that also put him in the right places. If it weren’t for that, it wouldn’t be possible to have Pessa in the bathtub, for example.”

Regarding the “Illustrated Afterword”, Daniel states that he intended to add something to the re-edition at a time when the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April is being celebrated. “It’s a tribute to the people who were part of our experience in democracy. People who came to us through television, people who contributed to, let’s say, affirming a people’s own culture. A people in democracy, with their problems , with their ways, with their… attempts to achieve perfection”, he explains. This Afterword begins with a photograph of Daniel Gil’s birth and ends with two personal photographs, one of Carlos Gil with Maria Judite, embracing, and the other is a self-portrait in a mirror. “Basically, this afterword is a series of intimacies. It ends with the self-portrait, but before that with his life partner. It’s my mother, the mother of his children. It’s difficult to say much more than that.”

He collaborated with reports from Baghdad, Iraq, shortly before the start of the Gulf War, having also visited countries such as Angola, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Libya, Jordan, China, Argentina, Mexico or Algeria when they were at war (or close), most of the time under a freelancer, writing and photographing at the same time. “He was a photojournalist through and through in the sense that he wasn’t just a photographer, he was also a writing journalist who really liked writing”, explains his son.

The photojournalist died in the early hours of June 2001, at the Curry Cabral hospital, in Lisbon, at the age of 64. His legacy was carried by his widow, Maria Judite, and her three children, all of whom are represented in this work that arrived back in bookstores this week.