Flavio Coelho. Claudio Edinger. Marc Ferrez. In 1902, the well-known Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez (1843-1923) was engaged by Rio de Janeiro’s Avenida Central construction committee to document an architectural development plan that would transform the city centre into one of the Western Hemisphere’s most beautiful boulevards. The concept was highly ambitious: within three years, 1,700 properties would be expropriated and more than 500 buildings razed to create the new urban space.
Once complete, Avenida Central (today’s Avenida Rio Branco) would be 2 kilometres long and 33 metres wide, and the city’s most important thoroughfare. For his project, Ferrez used a large-format camera to reproduce elevations of the buildings and photograph them once built, allowing a comparison between the structures as planned and as built. The CCA collection holds 110 plates from the first edition, representing nearly the entire project.
Ricardo Funari. Dado Galdieri. Dado Galdieri is a multilingual photographer and photo editor based in Rio de Janeiro focusing his visual exploration in five different yet interconnected areas of the human experience in the American continent: Man and the environment, Drugs and obsessive-compulsive behavior, Religion as a social control device, Land and the limits of our growth, Native Peoples and their ways of living. I have worked for The Associated Press for nearly a decade in almost all countries in Latin America. I call it my photojournalism school. Now I document the demographically overwhelmed environment, the integration of native peoples to a globalized society, the social control role of the religion, the abuse and utilization of drugs and the land we use to raise our food and children.
They are intertwined areas of our common human experience and my raw material. The American continent, for the geographical, historic and surreal reasons of having all the elements so mixed and vibrant, the place that I work. Pedro Lobo. Adonai Rocha.