Sergio Larraín

Sergio Larraín Echeñique (Santiago, 1931–Ovalle, 2012) was a Chilean photographer regarded as a key figure in the history of photography in his country. He was the only Chilean and the first Latin American to join the Magnum agency, one of the earliest photographic cooperatives in the world.

After a brief spell studying forestry engineering in Berkeley, he turned to photography at the University of Michigan. He held his first exhibition in Santiago in 1953 and, after travelling through Europe and the Middle East, settled in Valparaíso. Thanks to Henri Cartier-Bresson, he joined Magnum in 1959, and he left the agency for good in 1970.

His most important book, Valparaíso, appeared in 1991. His photographs are held in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he contributed images to Pablo Neruda's book Una casa en la arena.

Around 1968 he all but gave up photography and retreated to Tulahuén, a village in the foothills of the Andes, where he painted, meditated and studied Eastern mysticism. That seclusion fed a legend that inspired Marcelo Simonetti's novel El fotógrafo de Dios and Julio Cortázar's short story Las babas del Diablo, on which Antonioni based Blow-up.