Slaves on a coffee farm at Vale do Paraíba, RJ. Brazil

Marc Ferrez, author of an oeuvre on par with those of the greatest names in photography across the world, is the most important photographer of the period in the IMS’ collection. Preserved by his grandson, researcher Gilberto Ferrez, the glass negatives and prints produced by the photographer himself make up most of the Gilberto Ferrez Collection, a stock of 15,000 images unrivaled among private collections of 19th-century Brazilian photography, acquired by the IMS in May 1998.
Better-known to the public at large for his landscapes – principally panoramic photographs of the city of Rio de Janeiro and its surroundings, taken with special cameras on large-format negatives, a technique used by few photographers in the world and to which he dedicated all his technical inventiveness – the Ferrez that emerges from this collection is a restless, plural artist. Given the jobs that he was hired to perform, he tackled a wide variety of subjects; and as a researcher of techniques and processes at a moment of rapid evolutions in the science of photography, he pursued and developed pioneering projects.