Martins Sarmento (1833-1899) was an archaeologist, writer and pioneer of photography in Portugal. His photographic collection consists of 543 glass clichés, and is preserved by the Sociedade Martins Sarmento. As part of Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture, we were invited to join the team of the artistic project Reimaginar Guimarães, dedicated to this and other collections of the city. Learn more about our participation in this project here.
The exhibition “The Photographer Martins Sarmento” and its respective catalog are a selection of images of his authorship, presenting the archaeologist as a photographer and relating his photographic process with the archaeological works he carried out in the towns of Briteiros and Sabroso. The end of the publication, printed on cream paper, publishes for the first time the diary of Sarmento’s photographic process, in 92 pages.
The book is part of the collection of editions of the Reimaginar Guimarães project, and maintains common features with the other publications, such as the captioning of the images in a separate section at the end of the book, where we highlighted a detail of each image, trying to encourage the reader to do the same for each image – something we also tried to represent in the project's visual identity, with the suppression of the word “Guimarães” from the logo.