04.05.1951–?
José Manuel Rodrigues
The photographer and artist José Manuel Rodrigues was born in Lisbon in 1951 and left Portugal in 1968 to avoid the colonial war. He spent twenty-four years in the Netherlands, where he studied photography and ran the Perspektief gallery, and has worked in Évora since 1993. In 1999 he received the Pessoa Prize for his whole body of work.
Biography
In 1968 Rodrigues left Portugal. He was seventeen, the country was ruled by Salazar, and men were being called up to fight to keep Angola and Mozambique, then still Portuguese colonies. He did not want to fight.
He was born on 4 May 1951 in Lisbon, and his name in the documents is longer: José Manuel dos Santos Rodrigues. He spent his first year in exile in Paris. Then, in 1969, he moved to the Netherlands and stayed there until 1993.
He studied photography as an adult, in the second half of the 1970s. By one account, he attended classes in The Hague from 1975 to 1980; by another, he also went to a school of photography in Apeldoorn at the same time, from 1975 to 1979. In 1989 he took a video course at the Santbergen Institute in Hilversum. Later he described himself as both a photographer and an artist working in various media, not just with a camera. In the Netherlands he did more than take photographs. With others he founded the Perspektief art foundation and was responsible for the exhibition programme of its gallery. From 1987 to 1992 he was a member of the photographers’ association GKf (now DuPho) and of the Amsterdam Arts Council. In 1982 the Council gave him the Vrije Creatieve Opdracht prize for creative photography.
In 1993 Rodrigues returned to Portugal and settled in Évora, where he still lives and works. In 1999 he received the Pessoa Prize, awarded by the newspaper Expresso and the company Unisys together with the poet Manuel Alegre; it was given for his whole artistic work and his contribution to the arts in Portugal. In the same year a retrospective of his work from 1972 to 1997, titled “Ofertório”, was held at Culturgest in Lisbon, with a catalogue.
His works are held by the Serralves Museum in Porto, the Portuguese Centre of Photography, the Visual Arts Center, the Dutch Art Foundation and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Culturgest, the collection in Apeldoorn and the print room of Leiden University Library are also named. He taught photography at various schools and institutes in Rotterdam, Porto, Évora and Caldas da Rainha. In 2007 and 2008 he was a visiting professor on the master’s programme in visual arts at IADE in Lisbon. Since 2009 he has been an invited assistant professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Évora. He exhibits and gives lectures by invitation.
He has signed his works in different ways. Now he signs with his first name, the initial of his second name and his surname, but there are sheets signed “José Rodrigues” and “José Manuel Rodrigues”.
Profile notes