Ritual dance of the kayapó natives from the Kuben-kran-ken tribe, 1957 Pará. Brazil

The complete works of Piauí-born photographer José Medeiros, comprising around 20,000 negatives from a decisive moment in Brazilian photojournalism, were acquired by the Instituto Moreira Salles in August 2005. From age 25 to age 40, Medeiros worked for the magazine O Cruzeiro, then the largest in the country; at the time, its photography department, headed by Jean Manzon, was revolutionizing the Brazilian press’s treatment of photography. In the 1960s, Medeiros would dedicate himself to cinematic photography, becoming, as Glauber Rocha put it, “the only man who knew how to create a Brazilian light” – the same “environmental light, the most natural thing” (in the photographer’s words) that bathed his street scenes and his portraits of the famous and the anonymous, the poor and the rich, smiling girls in Copacabana and Indians in Xingu, revelers in Carnival and patients in an insane asylum, among the many extremes of Brazilian life that he recorded in his reporting.