The Stirring Coastal Imagery of Artur Pastor

“Living canvasses unparalleled in richness, landscapes bathed in light, full of different colors and fascinating contrasts. (….) What is time or physical presence if we only see what we dream, remember what we love and what we’re connected with forever.”

Like his eloquent descriptions suggest, the practice of Portuguese photographer Artur Pastor was a study in contrast: realistic depiction of his environment juxtaposed with a dreamy emotionalism steeped in memory and fantasy. His rich body of work constitutes an unmatched ethnographic catalogue of a Portugal that has since disappeared: women in traditional festive garb, tuna fishermen hauling and washing their nets along the Algarve coast, oxen pulling boats in Nazaré, the distribution of fish on the sand for auction in Sesimbra, seemingly endless fields and sea vistas, representing the vastness of his beloved “fatherland.” Despite the significance of his contributions and his artistry, which is considered equal to photographic masters Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, Artur Pastor remains relatively unknown—even in his native Portugal.

Pastor was born in 1922 in Alter-do-Cháo, a small municipality in the east of the country. It was common at that time for poor families to send children off to wealthier households to give them more opportunities for advancement, and Pastor was adopted when he was three years old. His adoptive father was the manager of the School for Agricultural Governance in Évora, where Pastor spent his early adulthood studying, completing the Agricultural Governors’ course in 1942.

That same year, he produced his first photographic images to accompany his thesis. Through these visual explorations of crops and agricultural activities, he discovered a talent and passion that would drive him for the rest of his life. Over the next years, he contributed photographs to illustrated publications, postcards, stamps and posters. He also wrote opinion pieces and literary features for newspapers. At 23, he presented his first exhibition, “Motivos do Sul.”

Pastor then began to travel through his home country like it held the entire world within it. He captured the intersectional periods before traditional farming methods were taken over by industrial machines. He captured the stillness of the sand. He captured the sound of everyday life. During his military service, he fell in love with the Algarve coast. He found beauty in the seemingly ordinary: the energetic work of fishermen, the bustle of the local market. He referred to rock formations in water as “nature and its chess figures.”

His most uncompromising tool was light. As Pastor’s son recollects, his father would spend an entire day sitting and looking for the perfect “tilt of sun.” A perfectionist in some sense, most of Pastor’s motifs were neither staged nor contrived to fulfill any dogmatic expression or preconception. He described photography as “understanding the art of seeing.”

Pastor’s words express awe for the power and beauty of his surroundings. His artistic approach, both realist and abstractly sentimental, translates the photographer’s attempt to rekindle a soon-to-be-lost connection, or to form a tentative alliance with it. Even as his images highlight the natural world—a place where humans seem to be an inevitable disturbance—his humanistic values become increasingly present.

In the early 1950s, Pastor joined the Ministry of Economy in Montalegre and was transferred in 1953 to the Director General for Agricultural Services. Here, Pastor, a skilled archivist, developed catalogs documenting agricultural activities that would grow into his vast photographic archive. An exhaustive collection of 10,000 images taken between 1940 and 1970, the collection is a rigorous and seminal repository, capturing crops, tools and farming techniques that document the agricultural methods of the time.

His work in Montalegre led to collaborations with organizations like the National Boards of Wine, Olive Oil and Wheat Producers, alongside ongoing commissions by international publications like “TIME” and “National Geographic.” It was during this time that he began to photograph the fast-paced, high-spirited life of the Minho region and its markets. He documented vendors and flavors, local clay vessels, baskets and piles of fragrant produce basked in sun just like most of his images.

In the photography books “Nazaré” (1958) and “Algarve” (1965), Pastor surprised his audience with his daring documentary approach. He wanted to free photography in his home country from narrowly defined themes and visuals, and he did so with great urgency. And yet there is hardly any mention of him in the history of Portuguese photography. His contemporaries received his work with stark criticism, mistaking his neo-realistic, dignified portraits of poverty for voyeurism. Half a century later, Pastor’s work can be understood as an amendment to this history: a documentation of the solidity and endurance of Portugal’s working class.

Toward the end of his life, Pastor took his retirement as a reason to produce even more photography, traveling across the country again, this time to capture not work in situ but the true witnesses of work. He photographed monuments, windows, and architecture as if he were racing against time, as if he feared its inevitable passing. He worked up until his death in 1999. In 2001 his archive was acquired from his family by Lisbon City Council.

As of 2021, the Lisbon City Hall owns approximately 210,000 of Pastor’s photographic works—6×6 and 35mm negatives, slides and print proofs of black and white photography produced over decades—which they have set about digitizing in an attempt to finally earn this unknown father of European photography the recognition he deserves. It is a long overdue reappraisal.

“He didn’t document the Portuguese as rich and extraordinary, as heroes, but as strong, proud and hale,” emphasizes Luis Pavão, a fellow Portuguese photographer and archivist in the documentary “The Landscapes of Artur Pastor” by the Lisbon Municipal Archive. Pastor’s work takes us back to a forgotten era but inevitably forces us to reflect upon the present: to question how we interact with our surroundings now and what tools we use to understand it. It challenges us to look in new ways. Above all else, it helps us understand what it means to see.