The Ilustração Portugueza (Revista Semanal dos Acontecimentos da Vida Portugueza) was a weekly magazine founded in 1903 in Lisbon, by the Empreza do Jornal O Século. The magazine distinguished itself at the beginning of the century due to its photographic coverage of events, contributing to the development of photojournalism in the early twentieth century.

Visual images like photographs can be analysed as historical sources as they contain a wealth of information and have been relatively underused. The benefits and possibilities of utilizing photographs as historical documents is that they provide opportunities to compare and engage in sociocultural and other analyses, even though photographs, just like paintings and engravings, are not always completely accurate representations of a subject, situation, and event. But the Ilustração Portugueza like other magazines and some books was also a vehicle of propaganda.

The aim of this paper, however, is to analyse the portrait of the Portuguese-speaking African colonies depicted in the magazine, books and essays based on the texts and photographs published between 1900 and 1920.

The magazine presents a specific section entitled “Vida Colonial†in some of the numbers of the magazine, that provides information about colonial life, while publishing also specific articles related to issues in Africa. Some novels and essays of the time also depicted, analysed and commented life in colonial Portuguese Africa and will also be analysed and compared in this work.