The Photobook: A History
Lisboa: cidade triste e alegre
Bibliographic Details
| Author | Victor Palla, Manuel Costa Martins, Manuel Ramos da Costa Martins |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Círculo do Livro, Lda. |
| Place of publication | Lisbon |
| Year | 1959 |
| Edition | First edition |
| Binding | Hardcover |
| Language | Portugese |
| Dimensions | 22,5 x 27,9 |
| Collation | 174 pp. |
Condition Report
| Condition | Very Good (VG) |
|---|---|
| Cover | Fair |
| Notes | Condition: Book inside and outside very good. Dust jacket fair with some tears and and some missing parts. Book was compared to reprint edition and contains all pages plus some extra black pages that are not in the reprint. Rare in any condition but especially complete and with dust jacket. |
Lisboa: The Graphic Poem That Reimagined a City
Victor Palla and Manuel Costa Martins’s Lisboa: cidade triste e alegre is among the Portuguese photobooks with the strongest international reputation. Published in Lisbon by Círculo do Livro in 1959, the first edition is recorded as a 174-page volume (Josef Chladek). It presents Lisbon not as a sequence of monuments but as an inhabited city of streets, neighbourhoods, workers, nightlife, and the Tagus waterfront.
Two architects, one city
Palla and Costa Martins were architects as well as photographers. A Portuguese museum account dates the project’s origin to 1953 and says that their archive ultimately held more than 6,000 Lisbon photographs (Museu do Neo-Realismo). A specialist description likewise says the pair photographed for about three years and made roughly 6,000 images for the project (Dirk Bakker Books).
That scale let them treat the city as an environment rather than a checklist of sights. The title’s opposition—sad and cheerful—signals a Lisbon experienced through changing moods. Faces, architecture, signage, shadows, work, and movement accumulate into a social portrait.
A photographic and literary structure
Palla and Costa Martins described the book as a “graphic poem.” The phrase is justified by the way photographs, poems, typography, and pacing work together rather than appearing in separate blocks. The copy described here records contributions by Alexandre O’Neill, Armindo Rodrigues, David Mourão-Ferreira, Eugénio de Andrade, Jorge de Sena, José Gomes Ferreira, and José Rodrigues Miguéis.
The physical construction reinforces that rhythm. The verified specialist collation describes half-sized pages, several fold-outs, and a twenty-page caption index within the first edition (Dirk Bakker Books). These devices vary the density and duration of reading. The book’s importance lies not only in individual photographs but in the editorial intelligence that turns them into a sustained passage through the city.
Publication history and collecting points
The first edition circulated initially in fascicles. The Museu do Neo-Realismo confirms fascicle publication in 1959, while Dirk Bakker Books specifies seven parts and explains that unsold fascicles were later bound into books (Museu do Neo-Realismo; Dirk Bakker Books). One described copy has a few pages bound in an order different from the index, so collectors should check collation copy by copy rather than assume that every bound copy has the same variation.
Collectors should also distinguish the 1959 issue from the 2009 Pierre von Kleist reissue. The latter celebrated the book’s fiftieth anniversary and included a supplement with a Gerry Badger introduction and an English transcription of the original index (Bint Photobooks). For a first edition, the binding, jacket, fold-outs, half-pages, index, and sequence of sections all merit inspection.
Why it matters
Lisboa: cidade triste e alegre demonstrates how a photobook can construct a city through rhythm rather than merely describe it. Its photographs preserve late-1950s Lisbon, but its larger achievement is formal: documentary attention, literary voice, architectural thinking, and graphic sequence become one work. It is not simply a record of Lisbon; it is a city remade in the act of reading.
