Alfredo Cunha’s Leica Years at the National Museum Soares dos Reis

The National Museum Soares dos Reis in Porto is showing images from 50 years of work by photojournalist Alfredo Cunha.

Alfredo Cunha’s Leica Years at the National Museum Soares dos Reis

It is unsettling yet reassuring to watch how Alfredo Cunha (b. 1953) works with a Leica. At the Soares dos Reis Museum, Leica Years is more than a retrospective: it is a visual autopsy of five decades in a country persistently determined to forget itself. Cunha does not simply take photographs; with surgical accuracy, he removes slices of time that make reality itself seem blurred or poorly rehearsed.

The exhibition’s impact is complete and unavoidable. Looking at these photographs means entering a taut exchange with the grain of the film, where black and white is not an aesthetic preference but a moral necessity. There is a brutal candour in the way the photojournalist recorded the Revolution and the social easing that followed: he refuses either to beautify hardship or to sanitise hope. This is photojournalism that moves beyond the factual, reaching the sort of truth that makes us want to look away but, here, holds us rooted to the spot, feeling the historical weight of every shutter release.

Rita Magalhães: Face to Face

Set among these works, in an intellectual and deliberately quiet counterpoint, is Face to Face by Rita Magalhães. If Cunha is the rumble of History, Magalhães is the object’s whisper. Her work creates a play of mirrors with the museum’s classical still-life collection - an exercise in meta-art with its own inherent irony: using a medium that arrests an instant, photography, to converse with a genre that immortalises decay, painting.

Where Cunha overwhelms us with the scale of the Human, Magalhães requires close observation. It is an exhibition for those who appreciate visual footnotes. Yet the weight belongs to Alfredo Cunha. His Leica sets the heartbeat of Portuguese identity, reminding us that the past is not somewhere we return to, but something that watches us with such truthful clarity that it hurts.