The Moreira Salles Institute and Photography

Founded in 1990 by ambassador and banker Walther Moreira Salles (1912-2001), the Moreira Salles Institute is a non-profit civil organization whose aim is the promotion and development of cultural programs. Its activities comprise five main areas: photography, literature, filmmaking, fine arts and Brazilian music.

The IMS manages 4 cultural centers and 4 art galleries in different cities:
Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Poços de Caldas, Curitiba and Porto Alegre. Besides, it coordinates the activities of the Espaços Unibanco de Cinema and Unibanco Arteplex national movie theater network. This group constitutes the largest private complex devoted exclusively to culture and arts in Brazil.

The Photographic Patrimony of the Institute began to be amassed in 1995, with the acquisition of the Mestres da Fotografia Brasileira do Século XIX (Great Masters of 19th-Century Brazilian Photography) Collection, followed by the acquisition, that same year, of 44 negatives belonging to Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of them featuring images of the city of Sao Paulo recorded by the anthropologist between 1935 and 1937, when he resided there as a lecturer at Sao Paulo University.

With the acquisition of the Gilberto Ferrez Collection and other significant 19th-century collections, the Moreira Salles Institute became the owner of the most important cultural patrimony associated to this period in Brazil, most of it dedicated to Rio de Janeiro, the then capital of the Empire; a collection in which names such as Marc Ferrez, Georges Leuzinger, Augusto Stahl, Revert Henry Klumb and Albert Frisch stand out, among many others.

It also amassed the best collection of Brazilian photography of the first half of the 20th century, in addition to maintaining a heritage of important contemporary names which included photographers such as Marcel Gautherot, Hildegard Rosenthal, Alice Brill, Carlos Moskovics, Henri Ballot, José Medeiros, Madalena Schwartz, Cássio Vasconcellos, Hans Günter Flieg and Maureen Bisilliat.

The main themes of the collection are: the transformations of the Brazilian urban landscape through the 19th and 20th centuries; Brazilian colonial and modern architecture; portraits in 19th and 20th-century photography; culture and popular festivities in the different regions of the country – in renderings spanning the period comprised between the decades of the 1940s and 1970s, in particular–; the urban and industrial development derived from investments in electricity made at the beginning of the 20th century; the world of work in urban and rural environments; and the natural landscape in several regions of Brazil.

The material, which includes more than 450,000 images, is gathered together in the Institute´s Technical Repository of Photography, built on the same premises as its cultural center in Rio de Janeiro. Covering a surface of approximately 600 square meters distributed in three floors, it is the largest building of its kind in Brazil devoted to the reception, restoration, conservation and dissemination of the country´s photographic heritage. It is also the most updated one in terms of technological resources, measured by international standards. Coupled with physical preservation, availability on the Internet allows researchers and people interested in the subject access to a comprehensive selection of images representative of the collections.

PHOTOS