Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Penguin.
Mirzoeff, N. (1998). An introduction to visual culture. Routledge.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015). Image science: Iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics. University of Chicago Press.
Editors: Maria José Canelo, Patrícia Silva
Deadline for submissions: July 20, 2025
Keywords: visual culture, revolution, images, freedom, April 25
This issue of e-cadernos CES focuses on an area that has so far been little explored in the academia: the visual culture of the April Revolution and the post-revolutionary period. This absence is all the more difficult to understand bearing in mind that it was a time of intense visual production, especially of public art, in addition to all the documentary (such as photography) and artistic records, which end up expressing the ways of seeing and giving visibility to this period. This applies not just to images, but also to practices – ways of seeing – most often associated with the social transformation of these contexts, in an understanding of visual culture that we owe to theorists such as John Berger (1972), Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998) and W. J. T. Mitchell (2015), for example.
In fact, cultural studies allowed for a broadening of the scope of the humanities that has allowed to understand how power does not reside in textual objects alone. In recent decades, the image has emerged with special relevance in a wider sense, as a complex cluster of form, color and text/meaning; in other words, as both a codified object and a codifier of ideologies and social practices. The immediacy of the sense of sight, on the one hand, and the spread of the image in modern societies, on the other, however, tend to normalize seeing practices, concealing the power relations that underlie them, fixing meanings in objects and neglecting the relationship of the subjects themselves with the image, and the entire process of representation activated by the beholder.
The approach in this thematic issue is precisely to critically dismantle the processes through which certain visual regimes are installed, on the one hand, but also how culture creates space for their contestation and for the creation of counter-visualities, on the other hand (Mirzoeff, 2011). In the context of April 25, 1974, protest gave shape to expectations, aspirations, and emotions that had no room for expression during the dictatorship. The interdisciplinary perspective of visual culture studies makes it possible to develop an articulated theoretical reflection and critical analysis of phenomena associated with a whole visual universe that April unfolded.
The aim of this issue of e-cadernos CES is therefore to reflect on how visual objects and visual practices, in the context of April 25, pointed to other models of seeing the world, representing issues of sociability, community and otherness, as well as detecting and repairing injustices and inequalities in the socio-cultural domain. This openness was inevitably reflected in the very concept of the visual, its means and conventions. Finally, we seek to find out how the process of making visible or invisible is (re)articulated, in visual objects and practices, in representations of freedom and citizenship. We thus aim to scrutinize counter-cultural and counter-hegemonic forms of artistic and popular expression, with a predominance of visual grammars that have been projected over time to the present day – from documentaries to painting, cinema, photography, urban art, posters, art installations, graphic novels and comics, updating the contribution and the ideals of the April Revolution.
e-cadernos CES is a peer-reviewed, online and entirely open access journal, published by the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). It is currently indexed in CAPES, DOAJ, EBSCO, ERIH Plus and Latindex. For more information on the publication consult: https://journals.openedition.org/eces.
All texts should be original and submitted in their complete version, in Portuguese, English, Spanish, or French. They must not exceed 60,000 characters (with spaces), including footnotes and bibliographical references. For the final section, @cetera, other texts may be presented (up to 35,000 characters maximum), such as interviews and debates (up to 25,000 characters maximum), or unpublished book reviews (up to 5,000 characters maximum). The submitted manuscripts must not have been otherwise published in full or in part (in both print or digital format), in the same language or another, nor be presently under submission to another publication.
Detailed guidelines for submitting texts are available at https://journals.openedition.org/eces/805. Manuscripts should be sent by email to e-cadernos@ces.uc.pt and authors should clearly identify the thematic issue in question ― “Images in freedom: visual cultures of April”.
All manuscripts will be subject to the double-blind peer review process.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Penguin.
Mirzoeff, N. (1998). An introduction to visual culture. Routledge.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015). Image science: Iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics. University of Chicago Press.