Maputo — The photography of Ricardo Rangel, who died last Thursday at the age of 85, has made "an indelible mark on the history of Mozambique", declared Prime Minister Luisa Diogo on Monday.

Speaking at Rangel's funeral, in Maputo City Hall, Diogo praised Rangel for using his camera "to denounce colonial dictatorship". She recalled that in the final years of the Portuguese colonial regime, Rangel had been harassed by the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE, and some of his photos had been banned.

Much of his work from that period, Diogo noted, could only be published after independence in 1975.

"He was much more than a photographer", she said. "He used photography as a weapon against colonialism and foreign aggression".

The general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (SNJ), Eduardo Constantino, recalled some of Rangel's most striking image - such as the haunting face of a young shepherd boy, who had been branded by his colonial employer as punishment for losing a cow, and the series of photographs showing the seamier side of Maputo (then Lourenco Marques), with the tawdry glamour of the night clubs where black prostitutes serviced white sailors near the port.

Constantino recalled that in building the new Mozambique after independence, Rangel "condemned the new injustices, the deviations and the errors", and "continued to fight for better quality in our journalism".

Joao Costa, of the Mozambican Photographic Association (AMF), declared "the man has died, but his work remains".

Rangel was born in Lourenco Marques in February 1924, into an ethnically mixed family with roots in Africa, Europe and Asia. From an early age he was fascinated by photography and started his career by developing photos in private studios in the early 1940s.

In 1952, he became the first non-white photographer employed on a Mozambican paper "Noticias de Tarde". Over the next two decades he worked on several papers in Lourenco Marques and Beira, and in 1970, he was one of a group of progressive journalists who set up the nearest thing to an opposition publication, the weekly magazine "Tempo".

After independence in 1975, Rangel played a key role in training a new generation of young Mozambican photographers. In 1981, he was appointed the first director of the weekly paper "Domingo", and in 1983, he founded the Photographic Training Centre. He was the director of the centre from that date until his death.

His love of Maputo led him to join the independent group "Juntos Pela Cidade" (JPC - Together for the City), and he was a JPC member of the elected Maputo Municipal Assembly from 1998 to 2003.

He was a founder and first chairperson of the Mozambican Photography Association, and was later given the honorary position of Life President of the association. His contribution to Mozambican culture was recognised by the country's oldest and largest institution of higher education, the Eduardo Mondlane University which last year awarded Rangel an honorary doctorate in social science.

Rangel was a jazz enthusiast, and in accordance with his wishes, most of the music played at his funeral was jazz.

After the ceremony, Rangel's remains were laid to rest in Maputo's Lhanguene cemetery.