Eduardo Gageiro

They described him as the ‘photographer of the people and of the revolution’. He defined himself as ‘a man of courage behind a camera’.

Later, with the influence of Armando Mesquita, a ceramics master, he persuaded his father to buy him his first camera. In the early days, he took his black and white photographs, captured with natural light, a characteristic that set him apart, to art salons around the world, where he soon began to be honoured and win prizes that revealed the unique talent that would mark his career.

He began his professional career collaborating with two of the most graphically innovative newspapers of the late 1950s and early 1960s: Diário Ilustrado and Almanaque magazine. However, it was mainly in the pages of Século Ilustrado that the power of his photographic eye became truly evident.

In 1965, Gageiro was arrested by PIDE for sending photographs to the foreign press that exposed the living conditions of the Portuguese people and the injustices of Salazar's political regime.

At dawn on 25 April 1974, Gageiro walked through the streets of Lisbon to record the events and met Captain Salgueiro Maia in Rua do Arsenal, where forces from the Practical Cavalry School of Santarém were clashing with the troops of Cavalry Regiment 7, loyal to the dictatorship.

For many people, this is the photograph that marked Portuguese and world journalism. Eduardo Gageiro, who happened to be following the Portuguese delegation on Canon business, found himself at the epicentre of one of the most shocking terrorist attacks in the history of the Olympic Games: the Munich Massacre. With ingenuity and courage, he infiltrated the Olympic village, joining a delegation from another country wearing a blue shirt identical to his own that day. And he climbed the stairs to the 16th floor, where the Portuguese delegation was staying.

The roll of film with the photograph was entrusted to a passenger, chosen randomly by the photojournalist, who gave it to a colleague from Século Ilustrado, who was waiting for him at Lisbon Airport. As soon as it arrived in the newsroom, the photograph was published on the cover of the next day's newspaper, immediately becoming a landmark in world photojournalism.

The recognition he has achieved has allowed him to step away from the news for a while and devote himself to more in-depth work, such as portraits of key figures in Portuguese society. These portraits reveal lesser-known facets of those personalities: Jorge Sampaio as a conductor, Ramalho Eanes surrounded by his watches, or Miguel Torga... in slippers! The portraits also include Helena Vieira da Silva, Amália Rodrigues, José Cardoso Pires, Álvaro Cunhal, António Lobo Antunes and Maria Lamas, all captured with Gageiro's unique sensitivity, capable of revealing the most human and unexpected side of each person.

Throughout his career, he has collaborated with renowned international newspapers and magazines such as the Herald Tribune, Stern, Paris-Match and Manchete, and has freelanced for prestigious institutions including Deutsche Grammophon, Yamaha and Cartier. He has published several books in partnership with writers and he is an honoured member of renowned international photographic associations, establishing himself as an essential reference in Portuguese photography.

In 2024, the year Portugal celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 25 April Revolution, the Cordoaria Nacional hosted a major retrospective dedicated to Eduardo Gageiro. Under the title Factum, the exhibition brought together around 170 photographs, tracing a vast portrait of his career and revealing the intensity of a gaze capable of crossing eras and retaining memories.

Eduardo Gageiro died on 4 June in Lisbon, aged 90. However, the echo of his vision remains: as Baptista-Bastos wrote, ‘Gageiro's photographs capture the tragedy of impossibility’. Images that don't expire at the moment they were taken, but which continue to tell us about the world, about life and about memory, immortals thanks to the sensitivity and strength of those who knew how to transform history into photography.