Wild Horses, Portugal 1950

Gordon Parks made this photograph, Wild Horses, Portugal. Parks was a staff photographer for Life magazine, the leading photojournalistic publication in the United States. It comes as no surprise that this image looks like a film still. In its composition, the image shows a heroic narrative of man versus nature. The silhouetted figures of the men, horses, and dramatic sky call upon the visual codes of romanticism, especially the sublime. Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship was ripe for this kind of romantic depiction of its rural people. Salazar's "Estado Novo" or "New State" was a right-wing authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974. Parks would have been commissioned to produce images that reinforced the regime's ideology. As art historians, we can look into the archives of Life magazine to determine the original context of the photograph and understand the social context that shaped it.