Ether/everything but taking your eyes off marked the photographic culture in Portugal in the 1980s and 1990s.

Structured as an association, it organized exhibitions and editions that embodied new perspectives and discourses. The collection, inventory and critical reading carried out by Susana Lourenço Marques allows us to understand its eclectic program and the way in which the indispensable foundations were established for the recognition of a valuable heritage of historical references.

During its thirteen years of activity, between 1982 and 1994, twenty-seven exhibitions were held that expanded the relationship between photography, cinema, drawing, painting and literature. This book covers these exhibitions that recover the photographic heritage from the 1930s to the 1960s, rediscovering names that were then forgotten and now fundamental — such as Victor Palla e Costa Martins, Gérard Castello-Lopes, António Sena da Silva, Carlos Afonso Dias or Carlos Calvet — and introducing a new generation of authors — such as Daniel Blaufuks or Augusto Alves da Silva.

This journey culminated in the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography with two retrospectives-synthesis of the History of Photography in Portugal, where the basis for the seminal work of António Sena, the History of the photographic image in Portugal, was forged.

This book is not a mere account of this history, and builds a unique look at this space of production, formation and circulation of photography. This is how its protagonists are revealed, but, above all, an effective relationship with photographic images, discovered in their preferred formats: exhibitions and books.