Jun 11 - Joshua Benoliel Exhibition – A Portuguese Photojournalist With Gibraltar Links
This year’s Gibraltar World Music Festival is starting with an exhibition paying tribute to Joshua Benoliel, the first Portuguese photojournalist with several links to Gibraltar. The event is organized in conjunction with Space 92 (at 92 Irish Town) with the collaboration of the Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa.
Joshua Benoliel (13 January 1873 - 3 February 1932) was a photojournalist born in Lisbon, to Judah Benoliel, a Gibraltar-Jewish born trader, and Esther Levy. After working as a dispatcher assistant, he began his real career as a journalist and photographer. He was practically the creator of the photographic reportage in Portugal.
He was passionate about big international stories and followed kings and presidents of republics from Europe and Brazil, with some of whom he had a great friendship. He was in London and France with D. Carlos I, he met the emperor William II of Germany, King Edward VII of England, and King Alfonso XIII of Spain who was one of his good friends.
For thirty years he had an active and busy professional life that no one in his time managed to equalize. He worked for numerous newspapers and national and international magazines. He went to O Século and the Ilustraçao Portuguesa to which he devoted most of his journalistic activity and witnessed the famous Conference of Algeciras.
He was honoured by the French Academy and with the Commendations of Santiago Order of Spain and the Spanish Civil Merit. In recognition of his value, his name has been used to name a street in Lisbon: the Joshua Benoliel street.
The impressive legacy of images left by Joshua Benoliel is part of a documental mass which historiography has to deal with. His photographs are essential for a clearer understanding of Portugal in the final years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. This extensive and contrasting photographic repertoire presents one of the most powerful tools for the re-observation and reinterpretation for that period of the Portuguese past.
“King of photographers and photographer of kings” shows the life of Portuguese society during the troubled transitional period from the Monarchy to the Republic, it is superbly portrayed. Benoliel, the photojournalist of the country and its capital in an accelerated social, economic and political mutation, was highly regarded by his contemporaries. The quality of his work has ensured that this well deserved recognition has endured until today.
Benoliel’s most important work was developed in the second series of the Illustraçao Portugueza (1906-1924), the illustrated supplement to the newspaper O Século. Founded in 1880, the paper was a republican inspired body of the press, one of whose main co-founders was the journalist and lawyer Magalhaes de Lima, who was renowned for his involvement with the republican cause. He was also correspondent for two prestigious European illustrated magazines at the beginning of the 20th century.
Gibraltarian Links
Joshua Benoliel was the great grandson of Judah Benoliel, consul of Austria and Morocco in Gibraltar and President of the local Jewish community. Due to his distinction, his education and his noble and generous character, he was called "the King of Gibraltar". Don Judah Benoliel had also complete trust in Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, who later became Pope Pius IX, who entrusted him on his return to Chile very large sums of money.
In conjunction with his brother Isaac, he was on the list of the leading merchants of Gibraltar that in 1817 contributed to the construction of the Stock Exchange building, the actual local Parliament.
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