Fifty years after the Carnation Revolution, Cunha's photographs continue to immortalise the military coup that changed the course of Portuguese contemporary history.
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00:00 On the 25th of April 1974, Alfredo Cunha had just turned 20 years old.
00:07 On that day, as a young photojournalist for the newspaper O Século, he did the most important job of his life.
00:14 For three days straight, he didn't stop photographing the Portuguese Revolution.
00:19 He didn't even go home.
00:21 Today, the photos he took are considered one of the most important testimonies to what Sofia de Mello Briner called the "initial, whole and clean day".
00:32 I left work at night, I got home and when I got home my mother told me there was a revolution.
00:39 I went back to the newspaper again and I went to photograph. I went to the newspaper O Século where I worked and I went to photograph.
00:48 Among the photographs he took that day, one became special.
00:52 It remained unpublished for 20 years and in 1994, on the 20th anniversary of the revolution, it was published by the newspaper Público and became iconic.
01:02 It was a portrait of Captain Salgueiro Maia, one of the main figures and main icon of the military coup.
01:09 This portrait, some people consider it to be a portrait of the 25th of April, I think it is a portrait of Salgueiro Maia, nothing more than that, but it takes us to a point where man transforms into a myth.
01:25 And that's what people see in this portrait.
01:28 Here is the command post of the armed forces movement.
01:32 This is a portrait of our youth, a partial portrait, but there are no women here, but it shows us the state of mind of that day, how we were, how we dressed, how we had our hair, if it was a multiracial society, if it wasn't.
01:53 And I think this is a portrait that, if we make an approximation between these two faces, shows everything.
02:02 It's Portugal in the 70s.
02:06 Alfredo Cunha is holding a series of exhibitions all over the country, like this one in Almada, entitled "The 25th of April 1974, Thursday".
02:18 They are also available in book form, in collaboration with other authors and artists.
02:23 Also in Almada, there is a series of works by various artists based on Cunha's photos.
02:29 These are new interpretations of history that the photographer helped document.
02:33 (upbeat music)
02:36 (whooshing)