Marc Ferrez, born to French parents in Rio de Janeiro in 1843, is the most important practitioner of nineteenth-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 (1906), a unique architectural photography series on urban renewal in Rio in the early 1900s. Ferrez died in Rio in 1923.