Discovering Brazil's unknown modernist photographers A MoMA exhibition displays the works of photographers who became pioneers of modernism in Brazil, but remained unacknowledged for the past 50 years. An expression of Brazilian modernist photography: 'Circus' by Julio Agostinelli (1951) Gertrudes Altschul, a Jewish photographer born in Germany in 1904, fled her home country to escape Nazi persecution in 1939. She immigrated to São Paulo, Brazil, where she opened with her husband a business of handmade decorative flowers. A few years later, in 1952, Altschul she signed up for a basic photography course and became part of a photo club called Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB).