Carnauba leaf, Fortaleza, CE. Brazil

Acquired by the Instituto Moreira Salles in 1999, the complete works of French artist Marcel Gautherot total around 25,000 images, a collection spanning a vast array of themes and placing its author among the fundamental names of 20th-century Brazilian photography. Born in Paris in 1910 and settled in Rio de Janeiro in late 1940, Gautherot cast his gaze – a mixture of the sober documentarian aesthetic of his generation and the keen aesthetic sensibilities of a man who had studied as an interior designer at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs – over such varied motifs as folklore, architecture, nature, and the human landscape in a range of regions across Brazil. In all these fields he maintained an exceptional standard of quality and a rare conscience of his work as a whole – which, in the last years of his life, would lead him to dedicate himself exclusively to the organization of his monumental archive.