The photographic record has become, from the second half of the nineteenth century, a privileged instrument of observation and description of the world. An instrument able to suggest the "objective" reality of the elements photographed, but also to record the realities imagined by those photographers, people and institutions that "ordered" the photos, and also by those who collect, select and organize them into albums or boxes. In addition to record "reality", the photographs also influence the perception of those whom the photos were taken for - their "target audiences", previously chosen, or other public, more spontaneous, diffuse or even unexpected. In this sense, more or less intentional and with different degrees of "success", the photographs are performing, are part of the construction and reconstruction of the order (natural, social) of the world, producing and/or reproducing the classifications and identification of the social space. The "authority" of the photographic discourse, associated with "spontaneous belief" in its truthfulness, in the possibility of registering an "objective" reality that is independent and neutral from the subject that is pictured, strength their prescriptive dimension. My objective with this text is to try to achieve an interpretation on how was organized the colonial Mozambique world and its people was classified using a set of photographic albums from the end of the second decade of the XX century.
mestizaje; colonial people; colonial citizenship empire
