“I managed to learn how to criticise the government without risking my life. One learns how to move around”
Since the early 1970s, Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz has built an expansive and unsparing body of images that penetrate the veils of censorship, marginalisation and societal denial. Errázuriz’s subjects – sex workers, psychiatric patients, circus performers, boxers, the blind, the elderly – inhabit a world rarely granted space in official narratives. Her portraits do not extract; they emerge from accumulated time, trust and negotiation – a sustained intimacy that displaces the photographer’s usual position of control. What results is not reportage but a practice of proximity, an approach grounded in duration, reciprocity and consent, in which visibility is not imposed but mutually constructed.
Working amid Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–90), Errázuriz, who is self-taught, began photographing at a time when being on the street after curfew risked arrest, and when documenting lives deemed ‘immoral’ – sex workers or the institutionalised – was a direct challenge to state censorship and social control. That resistance – quiet, persistent and methodical – has come to define her oeuvre. From Los dormidos (The Sleepers, 1979), a haunting portrayal of homeless people sleeping on the streets of Santiago, to La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple, 1982–87), a landmark series on gender-nonconforming sex workers in Santiago, and El infarto del alma (Heart Attack of the Soul, 1992–94), a collaboration with writer Diamela Eltit to record inmates inside a psychiatric hospital, Errázuriz’s work constructs a counter-archive of lives held in the peripheries of state and society alike.
Dare to Look, now on view at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, is Errázuriz’s debut institutional solo exhibition in the UK, at age eighty-one. Comprising 171 photographs, it spans five decades of practice. Far from a conventional retrospective, the exhibition confronts the viewer with the political and ethical stakes of visibility itself – what it has meant, historically, to look at those rendered marginal under authoritarian rule, and what it still means today. The exhibition takes its title not simply as invitation but as imperative; to look is to risk implication. Errázuriz’s work has long been visible across Latin America and Europe, with major exhibitions at Madrid’s Fundación MAPFRE (2015), London’s Barbican (where her work was included in the group exhibition Another Kind of Life, 2018) and the Venice Biennale (2015). Errázuriz’s work continues to unsettle the visual grammars of power, locating the photographic act not in revelation, but in solidarity. She spoke to ArtReview in a video call from her native Santiago.
Before I Was Someone
ArtReview You studied at the Cambridge Institute of Education during the late 1960s and then lived in London for a few years. How does it feel to return to the UK?
Paz Errázuriz I was fortunate to spend six years in England when I was very young because my husband had a scholarship from the British Council. So it was him, formally, who was studying – I was Mrs Something. That was what I was called. Now I’m Paz Errázuriz, a photographer. I’m a different person. But it’s been really wonderful. I’ve loved this new experience and it feels like closing a circle.
AR You lived here during a time of significant social and political turbulence. How informative was that period for you?
PE I was very young at that time, and it was an important period to learn about politics. In Cambridge we belonged to the Latin American Society, which was very active. We had [Pablo] Neruda in Cambridge, our Nobel Prize poet, and he used to take a siesta in my little place, we were very close. We regularly met other important political people from Chile, preparing their ideas at the time.
AR So would you say that period honed your political consciousness?
PE It was a privilege, I think that’s the word. I would also love to mention the most impressive person: Dr Alice Roughton. Everybody in Cambridge knows her name. She was an activist and received many, many refugees during the war. She ran this wonderful house where some of us lived. She participated in everything in the city and was very well read – good friends with famous people like Bertrand Russell. I learned a lot from her and my experiences in Cambridge. It gave me a strong position to come back to Chile and help the social government that was forming under [Salvador] Allende. It gave me a clear idea of how to confront.
The Smell of Trouble
AR Soon after your return to Chile, in 1973, Pinochet seized power and overthrew Allende. You lost your job as a primary school teacher due to your union membership and your house was raided by police. Can you give me a sense of your state of mind at the time?
PE Well, everything is a learning situation for me. You have to learn or find out how to move. I never thought about leaving Chile. I wanted to be here, to see with my eyes, and I had just had my second son. I managed to learn how to criticise the government without risking my life. One learns how to move around.
AR How did you navigate the dangers of being a female photographer on the streets?
PE My work in the streets was associated with this group of photographers that I cofounded [Association of Independent Photographers]. We had a badge that we thought would be respected by the military and the police, but many colleagues were beaten up. I don’t think there was a difference between men and women photographers. But I was so happy to be involved because I wanted to find out about my Chile and how people lived. Photography was a fantastic tool to get into places.
AR You said earlier that you had to learn ‘how to move’, can you expand on that?
PE Well, there was a curfew, so that was basic. But you have to know the hours, or if there was a military camp in that neighbourhood. It’s like smelling something.
AR Street sense.
PE Yes. And I still love the street. You only know a city if you walk the streets. That’s the only way you learn their secrets – you make different contacts, you learn to decipher.
AR Is it fair to say you almost rediscovered Santiago once you started taking photographs?
PE Definitely.
AR Were you ever scared?
PE Well, we were in touch with other photographers and learned things. Police used to take the film out of the camera and destroy it – that happened to me twice – important photographs, absolutely ruined. The fact that they raided my home meant I learned quite a bit. You learn about fear when someone points a machine gun at your stomach. But we shared information with other people about how to hide certain things. I burned many, many books because I knew that if I was found with them…
AR Your decision to enter brothels and psychiatric institutions was not just bold, it was boundary crossing. You came from a relatively privileged social position; how did that affect the dynamics of access and trust in these places?
PE Well, the way I received those opportunities was because of my work, I came with a portfolio of photographs to show them. Nobody helped me [get access] or gave me a letter [of recommendation]. They trusted me; it was amazing.
On Working Alone
AR Would you plan a series in advance?
PE When I was working on a project, that was all I worked on, the only thing I wanted. I planned my life around it. It was difficult, I had a baby, all sorts of domestic responsibilities…
AR How did you balance the work with being a mother?
PE The children never resented my absence; I was very close to them. I had done a children’s book [Amalia Diary of a Chicken, 1973] before anything else and they were the central characters, so in a way, I think they felt I shared something with them.
AR In La Manzana de Adán, the use of frontal, formal portraiture gives your subjects a classical kind of dignity. Were you deliberately referencing or subverting these aesthetic codes of colonial portraiture as a way of reframing transvestite identity?
PE No, I think that must have all been subconscious. I didn’t study photography, so I didn’t have that much to reference. Photography books didn’t exist here – you could hardly see a book.
AR Several of your subjects perform an identity – circus actors, wrestlers, trans sex-workers. What is it about performativity that attracts you?
PE Something goes back to my childhood. I went to circuses a lot as a child – some of the most wonderful people I’ve met are circus magicians. And I’ve always liked actors – one of my closest friends for many years was an excellent mime artist. I haven’t thought enough about it, but I was very interested in dressing up as a child. I think it’s the first time I’ve said that, but it’s true.
AR You had to be very secretive when you developed your films, can you tell me more about those experiences?
PE I had my darkroom at home and I had to work at night mainly, I was always careful. I talked to other photographers about whether we could build something together, but we never did.
AR How did those constraints affect the aesthetics of your work?
PE I don’t know if I thought in that sense, I only was worried we didn’t have enough material. That was the problem we had in Chile: no film, no paper. Sometimes a friend brought a box of paper from abroad but there was a shortage of photographic material for everybody.
AR So you were very sparing with your film?
PE Of course. When I look at one of my contact sheets from those times, half of the 36 frames on the page are protests in the street or street violence, then encounters with my friends, transvestites, and the last six pictures are of my baby. It’s like a diary.
AR Do you miss that intimacy with your film in this era of digital?
PE Yes. It was very difficult for me to change into digital, the process in the darkroom was the moment of silence that I needed to look and think about these photographs I was developing. It was very, very important.
Collaborations
AR Your work is multidisciplinary. You’ve collaborated with sociologists, anthropologists and scientists, among others. In El infarto del alma, you worked with Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. How do you see the role of language in expanding the meaning of your photographs?
PE Diamela was not in Chile when I told her about the project, so we started working by fax. I’d send her photographs and she would send me written responses. I felt enriched, absolutely enriched, because it grew the whole concept I had in my head of my own work. I kept all these fax pages in the drawer and when I recently went to order them I found the ink had faded and they’d all turned white.
AR You often return to your subjects repeatedly over years, sometimes even over decades. What does this slowness offer you, ethically and aesthetically?
PE I never thought that would happen, but I did a very big, long work on an ethnic group from Patagonia, Kawésqar [Kawésqar, hijos de la mujer sol, 2006]. For me, it’s very beautiful, they are survivors and very few. I’ve been back to Patagonia quite a lot and became friends with a few Kawésqar – one came to Santiago, to stay with me. I’m working with a museum there and last year I met two sons whose parents I’d photographed. They came to me and said, “Please, why don’t you do the same, but with our generation?” I almost fainted with that question. I said, “Of course,” and I started working on it. But they want me there, so in that case, there cannot possibly be the chance of abusing their trust or confidence.
Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look is on view at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, through 5 October
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