Celebrating Recent Work by João Pina

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by João Pina

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise.

About the Author 

is a freelance photographer born in Portugal in 1980. He began working as a professional photographer at age eighteen, and graduated from the International Center of Photography’s Photojournalism and Documentary Photography program in New York in 2005. Pina’s photographs have been published in D Magazine, Days Japan, El Pais, Expresso, GEO, La Vanguardia, New York Times, New Yorker, Newsweek, Stern, Time, and Visão, among others. His work has been exhibited at the Open Society Foundations (New York), International Center of Photography (New York), Point of View Gallery (New York), Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York), King Juan Carlos Center – NYU (New York), Canon Gallery (Tokyo), Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro), Museo de Arte do Rio (Rio de Janeiro), Paço das Artes (São Paulo), Centro de Fotografia (Montevideo), Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago de Chile), Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires), Torreão Poente – Museu de Lisboa (Lisbon), KGaleria (Lisbon), the Portuguese Center of Photography (Porto), Visa pour L’Image (Perpignan), and Reencontres d’Arles (Arles). He is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. 

About the Speakers

 is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history. He read classics and philosophy at Oxford, studied international affairs at Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center, and has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford (1988). His books include Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44(1993); Dark Continent: Europe's 20th Century (1998); The Balkans (2000); and After the War was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (2000). His Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (2004) was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. In 2008, he published Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe which won that year’s LA Times Book Prize for History. His most recent book is No Enchanted Palace: the End of Empire (2009), and he is currently working on a history of internationalism.

 combines photography, films, archives, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings)– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely, and unstable, transnational alliances and collisions. Despite underlining a historic tendency toward misrecognition of allies, the hope for a future international left, as an alternative to current silos of race and religion, is always a basis for the work. A throughline in all his work is family unit as locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging ground for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. He is an associate professor and the Concentration Head of Photography at Columbia University School of the Arts. 

 is the Academic Adviser at the JIE Scholars Program. Her work centers on confinement in all its forms, from the benevolent (hospitals, schools) to the sinister (concentration camps and prisons). She is the author and editor of multiple award-winning books and articles on the subject, most recently Foucauld’s Node: Leros and the Grammar of Confinement. Since 2022, she has co-organized and co-directed the Leros Humanism Seminars.

 is an associate professor and the Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish 2024-25 at Yalue University. She specializes in 19th-century Iberian cultural studies: carceral studies, disability studies, transatlantic studies, slavery networks, Filipino studies, popular music, journalistic discourse, archival studies, mass and working-class organizations, and Catalan Studies. 

Her book, Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (Purdue University Press, 2018; Recipient of the North American Catalan Society Prize for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan Studies, 2019), challenges the conventional cultural and intellectual history of the relationship between bourgeois intellectuals and the working class in modern Iberia by analyzing philanthropic projects addressed to industrial workers.

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Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities