Resumo

Aurélio da Paz dos Reis occupies a unique position in the history of Portuguese visual culture. While he is widely acknowledged for introducing cinema to Portugal in 1896 with Workers Leaving the Confiança Factory, his later extensive engagement with stereoscopic photography remains comparatively underexplored. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paz dos Reis produced a vast archive of over seven thousand glass plates, revealing a visual practice marked by careful staging, spatial composition, and technical experimentation.
This article presents an in-depth analysis of a single stereoscopic photograph taken in 1908 portraying his daughter Hilda Ophélia. Rather than approaching the image as a straightforward domestic record, the photograph is examined as a carefully constructed mise-en-scène in which objects, gestures, and spatial organization operate as narrative and symbolic devices. This article explores how this photograph anticipates modes of seeing and narrating associated with cinematic language, particularly through the spatialization of the gaze and the perceptual activation produced by stereoscopy.
Methodologically, the research adopts an artistic approach, mobilizing cinematic tools such as framing, fragmentation, sequencing, and the modification of gaze over time as analytical instruments for reading photographic images. By focusing on a single visual object, this article argues that one photograph can operate both as the point of departure and as the vehicle for the construction of a film, highlighting cinema’s potential for reactivating photographic archives and rethinking the relationship between still and moving images.