Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication date: February 2025
Print length: 210 pages
Language: English
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Sergio Larrain: Valparaíso invites readers to wander the winding hills and salted air of a city that breathes paradox — a place at once crumbling and magical, melancholic and alive. This first English-language edition brings together a deeply personal photographic journey by Larrain, the celebrated Chilean photographer, whose devotion to Valparaíso stretches from his early years to the final decades of his life. Across 120 images — far more than the original book — he retraces alleys, stairways, shuttered ports and faint glimmers of human presence, casting a poetic light on a city in quiet decline.
Returning in the early 1960s after working around the world as a member of Magnum, Larrain found in Valparaíso a city steeped in contradictions. Once a bustling hub, its harbors had lost importance; the roaring ships were replaced by whispered rumors of what once was. Yet in decay he perceived something profound — the crumbling facades, the steep stairs, the sweeping Pacific horizon and distant Andes mountains offered a melancholic grandeur, reminiscent of ancient coastal towns at the end of an era.
This new volume blends Larrain’s images with personal touches: handwritten notes, reflections, annotations — traces of his gaze and memory beside the photographs. A text by the great poet Pablo Neruda, originally written for the first edition, deepens the emotional resonance, offering words that echo with salt wind and longing, while an essay by scholar and curator Agnès Sire sheds light on Larrain’s method, his obsessions, his love for chiaroscuro and atmosphere.
Beyond simple documentation, the book becomes a meditation on impermanence and identity, on how places — like people — age, shift and survive on memory and imagination. Valparaíso as seen by Larrain is haunted, intimate, alive — a collage of stairs, windows, light and shadow that speaks of beauty in decline and dignity in neglect. In these pages, the seaport is not just captured, but remembered, mourned and loved.
Sergio Larrain: Valparaíso stands not only as a tribute to a city, but as one of photography’s most sensitive portraits of place — a love letter to a world caught between waters, hills, history and dream, suspended in light and time.