Housed in a slipcase, Rio contains the work of two photographers who portray Rio de Janeiro in a visual dialogue spanning the centuries. Book One showcases nineteenth-century photographer Marc Ferrez's classical work on the city where he spent his five-decade career, from the mid-1860s to the early 1910s, while Book Two presents a project of Robert Polidori's from the past five years, in which he photographed Rio, emphasizing its contemporary dynamic and dense urban configuration. Polidori contextualizes today's Rio within the natural settings from which the city grew, and which have defined its iconic international profile throughout history. This tension between the natural and built environments, also significant in Ferrez's work, is a defining reference for Rio's inhabitants and is here beautifully documented in its historic and present variations. Marc Ferrez (1843-1923) is the most important Brazilian photographer of the nineteenth century. Ferrez produced a vast documentation of Rio 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 (1905), a unique architectural photography series on urban renewal in Rio in the early 1900s.

Robert Polidori (born 1951) was born in Montreal and today lives in Los Angeles. Polidori received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000 and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006 Polidori's controversial photographs of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath were exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.