Sergio Larrain was born in 1931 in Santiago de Chile. He studied music before taking up photography in 1949, from which year until 1953 he studied forestry at the University of California at Berkeley. He then attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before setting off to travel throughout Europe and the Middle East. Thus began Larrain's work as a freelance photographer. He became a staff photographer for the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro and in 1956, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought two of his pictures.
In 1958, Larrain was given a grant from the British Council that allowed him to produce a series of photographs of London. The same year Henri Cartier-Bresson saw his photographs of street children and suggested that he work for Magnum. Larrain spent two years in Paris, where he worked for international press titles.
Larrain became a Magnum associate in 1959 and a full member in 1961. He returned to Chile in 1961 when the poet Pablo Neruda invited him to photograph his house.
In 1968, he came into contact with Bolivian guru Óscar Ichazo and virtually gave up photography to pursue his study of Eastern culture and mysticism, adopting a lifestyle in keeping with his ideals. He has devoted himself to spreading knowledge of yoga, writing, painting in oils and occasionally taking the odd photograph.
In this new edition of London, including previously unpublished photographs and visual references, Sergio Larrain presents a powerful portrait of a city on the brink of a new era.
In the winter of 1958, Sergio Larrain traveled to London. He spent just a few months there, photographing subjects that interested him and embracing the shadows of the city. In the cold and damp, his images captured a tangible darkness in which he could 'materialize that world of phantoms.' A few years later, he joined Magnum Photos and set off around the world, before retiring to the Chilean countryside and leaving photography behind.
The book also features a text by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño - written in 1999 specifically to accompany these images - as well as a new essay by Agnès Sire, artistic director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, detailing Larrain's stay in London.
A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain had a photographic career that was relatively short before he retreated to the Chilean countryside in the late 1960s to study meditation. Nevertheless, he is widely celebrated for his experimental process and the raw imagery he produced throughout Europe and Latin America. His most well-known project, Valparaíso, began in 1957 while he was traveling with poet Pablo Neruda for Du magazine. When the photographs were first published in 1991, Larrain informed the publishers that he had made his own facsimile of the book, reflecting how he would have constructed the layout, and now this facsimile is beautifully produced for the first time in book form. Including text by the celebrated Pablo Neruda as well as correspondence between Larrain and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Valparaíso presents the long-awaited return of this rare and renowned body of work.
A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain (1931-2012) has nonetheless become a touchstone for those who have come to know and love his work, including authors Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. Celebrated by Henri Cartier-Bresson, his contemporary and a co-founder of Magnum, Larrain's experimental process yielded images that transformed the fixed nature of the medium. His images have left generations of viewers in awe of the simultaneous serenity and spontaneity that a camera can capture--when placed, that is, in the hands of an artist with such rare meditative passion. "A good image is born from a state of grace," the artist once explained. Sergio Larrain, a selection of more than 200 images, rectifies Larrain's omission from the canon of significant twentieth-century photographers, and combines his work in Latin America with photographs taken in Europe.
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