Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements takes as its subject a body of printed matter that rarely circulates in photographic history: photobooks, militant publications, magazines, posters, photographs, films and artworks produced amid anti-colonial struggle and the first years of independence in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, roughly between the 1960s and 1980s. Edited by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer and published by ATLAS, the volume grew out of research begun in 2018 and shown in exhibitions at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris and the Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon in 2021 and 2022.
The book’s approach is archival rather than monographic. It reconstructs the material history, motifs and forms of a transnational liberation aesthetics, situating each publication within the geopolitical and cultural circumstances that produced it. A foreword by Miguel de Barros opens the volume; the editors contribute an introductory essay; researchers Drew Thompson and Lúcia Ramos Monteiro add texts; and a 1971 FRELIMO speech, “The Growth of a New Culture,” is reprinted. Newly commissioned interviews with photographer and filmmaker Augusta Conchiglia and photographer Moira Forjaz complicate dominant historiographical accounts, including from a gendered perspective. The Furtado Schefer design studio contributes a visual essay tracing the genealogy of anti-colonial visual culture.
Its significance lies in that double movement: between activism and formal experimentation, and between the printed object and the armed struggles to which it was bound. The 288-page, trilingual edition (English, French and Portuguese) gathers excerpts from photobooks now out of print, making dispersed material legible together. For collectors interested in the photobook as a political instrument, in Lusophone Africa, or in publishing histories that exceed the usual Euro-American canon, this is a reference work with few equivalents.
The volume received the Aperture PhotoBook Awards Photography Catalog of the Year at Paris Photo in 2025. It reproduces 253 illustrations across its pages, and was published in September 2025.
The credited editors work in independent research and film production and in cinema studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University respectively. Their collaboration brings historical research and attention to moving and printed images into the same project, connecting the study of publications with the political circumstances of their production.
