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Rio consists of a slipcase containing the work of two photographers who portray Rio de Janeiro in a visual dialogue spanning different centuries. Book one showcases 19th-century photographer Marc Ferrez s classical work on the city where he was born and spent his life and five-decade career, from the mid-1860s to the early 1910s. Ferrez s complete archives of glass plates and vintage prints are today housed at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro and have been scanned anew for this edition.
Book two presents a project developed by IMS with Robert Polidori over the past five years, for which Polidori extensively photographed Rio, emphasizing its contemporary dynamic and dense urban configuration. Polidori contextualizes today s Rio within the natural settings from which the city grew, and which have defined its iconic international profile throughout history. This tension between the natural and built environments, also significant in Ferrez s work, is a defining reference for Rio s inhabitants and shapes both their past and present cultures.

Co-published with Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro.

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Marc Ferrez, born to French parents in Rio de Janeiro in 1843, is the most important practitioner of 19th-century Brazilian photography. During his fifty-year career, Ferrez produced a vast documentation of Rio de Janeiro and its surroundings using specialized cameras and large-format negatives, including a rotating panoramic camera. His last large-scale project was the Avenida Central album (1905), a unique architectural photography series on urban renewal in Rio in the early 1900s. Ferrez died in Rio in 1923. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and today lives in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of exhibitions in New York, London, Brazil and Montreal, among others. Polidori received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006, Polidori´s controversial photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion-Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Muséologique Revisité (2009), Some Points in Between...Up Till Now (2010), Eye & I (2014) and Chronophagia (2014) have been published by Steidl.

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