Marcel Giró

Marcel Giró's work is part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) photography collective, a leading figure in avant-garde photography in Brazil, characterized by its constant search for new visual languages and the creative fervor of postwar Brazil. Rocio SantaCruz actively works with the photographer's family collection.

Marcel Giró arrived in São Paulo in 1948 and joined the FCCB after a long career as an amateur photographer. His first photographs date back to the 1930s and feature the landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees as their main backdrop. They primarily capture details of mountains and lakes, already displaying a particular sensitivity toward abstraction, a style that would define his work. In 1953, Marcel opened the Estúdio Giró photography studio with his wife, Palmira Puig, also a photographer at the FCCB. Giró then established himself as a professional photographer and began a productive career as a pioneer of advertising photography.

Giró's work is articulated from a precise and innovative perspective. His photographs display a recurring interest in geometric shapes, chiaroscuro, and extreme contrasts. With these elements, Giró creates his own aesthetic, a new photographic syntax, in which the artist constantly strives, through his eloquent interplay of light and shadow, to push the boundaries of representation and meaning.

His work has been included in important international collections, such as MoMA (New York) – which can be seen in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 from March to June 2021 –, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo) and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC, Barcelona), among others.