Sergio Larrain

The exhibition consists of 112 photographs arranged in three large groups: Los niños vagabundos (Vagabond Children), Valparaíso and London. Three photographic essays that show the essential characteristics of their author, one of the great names of the legendary agency Magnum Photos. Also included in the exhibition is work done in his early years in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, and a selection of photographs taken in Italy, France and Iran. The exhibition catalogue reproduces the photographs exhibited, together with essays by Agnès Sire, Roberto Bolaño and Josep Vicent Monzó, texts by Pablo Neruda first published in the magazine Du in 1965 and later included in the book Valparaíso in 1991, and a selection of writings by Sergio Larrain. The Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain (Santiago de Chile 1931) received a wide-ranging visual education in his childhood under the guidance of his father, who was an architect, teacher and later Dean of the University of Santiago de Chile; at home he had regular access to magazines such as Minotaure and Urbe and books with illustrations by artists such as Matisse and Cézanne. In 1949, after completing his basic education, he went to the United States to study forestry at the University of Berkeley (California). It was then that he acquired his first Leica camera and took his first steps in photography. The following year he moved to Ann Arbor University in Michigan, where he had the use of a laboratory and was able to do his first developing. After taking the decision not to continue studying forestry, he accompanied his family on a journey around Europe, Egypt and the Middle East. In Italy he saw photographs by Giuseppe Cavalli which gave him new ideas about photography. On his return to Chile he sought the seclusion of a house close to Valparaíso, where he devoted himself to the reading of poetry and philosophy and set up a small darkroom in which he developed the photographs that he took on his visits to the city. After this period of isolation he worked for the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro and as a freelance photographer. In 1953 he presented his first exhibition in Santiago de Chile, as a result of which he received a commission from the charitable organisations El Hogar de Cristo and Mi Casa to take photographs of children living in the streets of Santiago. In 1956 he assembled a portfolio of his best photographs and sent them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which bought two of them. Later he published some of these pictures in the book El rectángulo en la mano, which he co-authored with the poet Tiago de Melo. In 1959 he received a grant from the British Council to travel to London, where he produced some of his finest photographic work. The same year Henri Cartier-Bresson saw his photographs of street children and suggested that he should work for the Magnum agency. Sergio Larrain moved to Paris, where he lived for two years, working for the agency. His reportages appeared in large-distribution magazines such as Paris Match. Shortly afterwards Pablo Neruda, who was a friend of his father, commissioned him to take photographs of his home on Isla Negra for a book that appeared in the series Imagen y Palabra published by Lumen. This collaboration with Neruda was resumed some years later in the publication of the photographs of Valparaíso, which appeared for the first time in the magazine Du in 1965. In 1968 he came into contact with Óscar Ichazo and practically gave up photography in order to pursue his study of Eastern culture and mysticism, adopting a lifestyle in keeping with his ideas. He settled in Ovalle, a town in the mountains of Chile, and there he has devoted himself to spreading knowledge of yoga, writing, painting in oils and occasionally taking the odd photograph. Testimony to his work as a photographer can be found in numerous books, such as El rectángulo en la mano (1963), La casa en la arena (with Pablo Neruda, 1966), Valparaíso (1991), published in connection with the exhibition held at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles the same year, and London (1998); the series of photographs London was presented together with the book in the Mois de la Photographie in Paris in 1998. One of his most representative reportages published in Chile is called Imágenes de una tarde de verano en el norte (Pictures of a Summer Afternoon in the North). Larrain has also made an 8-minute short film in 16 mm called Vagabond Children.