Detail of the metal structure of the ministries, Brasília, DF. 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.