Author Description

Marcel Gautherot is regarded by many as one of the most significant French photographers. Yet he is not as well known, and even less published, as some of his contemporaries. The most famous part of his work is the documentation of the construction of the Brazilian capital Brasilia 1958-1960, consisting of around 3,000 images, and also later images he took of this extraordinary place until the 1970s, widely appreciated as a high point of 20th-century architectural photography. Gautherot was born in Paris in 1910. In 1925, when he already was an architect's apprentice, he enrolled in an evening class in architecture at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs. He continued his education in architecture and interior design at college and working for various firms, with a keen interest in the Esprit Nouveau and Bauhaus movements and their respective proponents such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the early 1930, he abandoned his studies in architecture to follow his interest in photography and his desire to travel, and joined Alliance Photo, a photo agency in Paris. From 1936, Gautherot also worked for the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, documenting the museum's collection but also to photograph the French regions and their local culture, and on a seven-month trip to Mexico. Another extensive journey led him to Brazil and Peru in 1939. On the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the French army and served in Senegal. Gautherot was demobilized after the French surrender in summer 1940 and decided not to return to occupied Paris. Instead, he returned to Brazil and made Rio de Janeiro his home for the entire rest of his life. He quickly made friends and engaged in dialogue with a circle of artists and intellectuals who were soon to become important figures in Brazilian culture, including the architect Oscar Niemeyer and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, whose work he documented extensively. From 1947, he worked for vari