Para uma cultura visual do farol

: uma abordagem semiótica a partir do bilhete-postal ilustrado

Abstract

Towards a Visual Culture of the Lighthouse: a Semiotic Approach based on the Picture Postcard analyses a corpus of selected picture postcards, from the 20th century, featuring photographic representations of lighthouses located on the Portuguese continental shoreline. Ever since their first introduction, in the end of the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century, picture postcards were a widely used means of communication. Its heyday corresponds to the first quarter of the 20th century. In fact, the postcard fostered the circulation of a wide range of photographic images. Once the images it carried – and still carries – deserve an insightful critical look, over the last decades, the picture postcard originated prolific scientific production, which enhanced its value as a complex cultural object. Hence, the picture postcard proves to be the suitable means to the analysis of the visual protagonist of the photographs studied in the current research: the lighthouse. On the other hand, lighthouses are indispensable maritime signals/aids to navigation which have undertaken a long material evolution path. They are semiotic buildings since they cast a visual signal that discloses a simple message: “danger zone” and “you are here” (safety to navigation and geo-positioning). The buildings themselves, through their individual material configuration, are signs and their physiognomy is depicted and recorded on nautical charts as key reference points. This research queries how the picture postcard accrues to a visual culture of the lighthouse while it also asks how the lighthouse has impact on the construction of a visual culture. To answer these questions the research problematizes and reveals the intrinsic characteristics of the composite artifact picture postcard/lighthouse. To that end, both objects are examined in their singular individualities and in what they share as means to convey messages, in the light shed by a semiotic approach. Once the original images, gathered in a picture postcard collection, reveal buildings located on the Portuguese continental shoreline, both the research and its framework take the national reality as their subject matter. Therefore, the research lays the foundations to grasp the political and administrative reason and the ontological analogy that lies at the heart of the fusion of the communications and lighthouse services, carried out by the Portuguese State, in a specific period (1880-1892). This study uncovers, too, the circumstances which afforded the union between the picture postcard and the lighthouse, to meet its goal: the studium (Barthes, 2000) of the selected corpus of picture postcards with photographic renderings of the lighthouse both from a denotative perspective, but also, and foremost, from a connotative perspective with the aim of disclosing a visual culture of the lighthouse.

Date of Award	29 Nov 2024
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Isabel Capeloa Gil (Supervisor)