Crucifixes, Merida. Mexico

A pioneer of fashion photography in Brazil and one of the best-known Brazilian photographers abroad, with a series of 43 photographs in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York since 1969, Otto Stupakoff, a native of São Paulo, had his complete works – a collection of around 16,000 negatives – acquired by the Instituto Moreira Salles in September 2008. Apart from fashion shoots and portraits of international celebrities in arts and politics, produced for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Esquire, Glamour, Look, and Vogue, Stupakoff, who spent the most productive phase of his career in New York and Paris, also left lesser-known series of portraits, nudes, street snapshots, photographs of his countless travels around the world (even to the Arctic), and experiments that border on abstractionism.