How Lisbon’s Trams Give a Poster Its Sense of Motion

Look at a Lisbon tram poster and try following the rails before looking at the tram. Where do they lead? Do they carry your eye down the street, towards a bend, or straight into the front of the carriage? You can spend a surprising amount of time on that small question. A poster can hold a tram still and give you a strong sense of where it’s going.

A route through the city’s changes of pace

Lisbon’s 28E is a good place to start. The route listed by Carris runs between Martim Moniz and Campo de Ourique (Prazeres), passing through Graça and Chiado and stopping near the cathedral, the Sé. Visit Lisboa describes the little yellow trams passing tiled buildings, climbing hills and winding between neighbourhoods. Put those details together and you have the ingredients of a street scene that can change shape in the space of a block.

Seen from street level, a hill can make the far end of a road disappear. A bend can hide the next stretch of track. The tram gives the eye something to hold on to through those changes. You can see how it sits in the space between the buildings and imagine how much room it has to move. That relationship between vehicle and street is part of what makes Lisbon so readable in a poster.

Two ways to look at a tram

In Alecse’s Lisboa Tram Down, try looking at the whole street first. Notice how much of the scene surrounds the tram. The buildings give it a scale, and the slope gives it somewhere to go. Your eye can find the carriage, wander along the façades and return to the street with a better sense of its shape.

With In Front of the Tram, try the reverse. Start with the carriage and see how much of the city you can piece together around it. The head-on view gives the scene a different kind of tension. It puts you in a position you would rarely linger in on an actual street, close enough for the front of the tram to organise the view.

Those two readings work even if you have never been to Lisbon. Look away from each poster and ask what you remember first. It might be the shape of the street in one and the face of the carriage in the other. That difference is the work of framing. Move the point of view and the same kind of vehicle can give you a very different sense of a place.

Try looking beyond the carriage

The next time a tram catches your eye in a photograph or poster, take a moment to look at what’s beside it. See where a building cuts into the sky, where the street opens up and where the lines leave the edge of the picture. The carriage may be what drew you in. The street gives you a reason to keep looking.

Alecse’s Lisbon travel posters offer a few more ways to try this, including views that give the city’s azulejos, its decorative tiles, the attention a tram usually gets.

For a different sense of motion, look up. In Alecse’s newly released Santa Justa Elevator poster, the lift draws your eye upwards from the street. Set it beside the tram prints and you get another way to read Lisbon’s hills. The tram takes you along the slope. The lift makes you look at the city in layers.

Further reading

• Carris, route 28E
• Visit Lisboa, No. 28 Tram
• The Poster Chronicles, Why We Bring Places Home