(1931, Santiago de Chile, Chile — 2012, Ovalle, Chile )

Sergio Larraín Echeñique was a Chilean photographer specialized in “Street Photography”.

His father was the architect Sergio Larraín García-Moreno, who enjoyed great prestige as a modernist author and was founder of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. At eighteen he traveled to the United States to study forestry, but he did not like it and decided to study photography, so he moved to the University of Michigan.

He returned to Chile in 1951 and made his first exhibition in Santiago in 1953. Thanks to Henri Cartier-Bresson, he entered as an associate member in 1959 of the Magnum agency and with full rights as of 1961.

His first published book was The Rectangle in the Hand in 1963, which accompanied an exhibition he made in Santiago. In 1966 he collaborated with his photos in Pablo Neruda’s book entitled Una casa en la arena. In 1968, on the occasion of another exhibition in Lausanne, he published another book entitled Chile; however, his most important book was Valparaíso, which appeared in 1991, while his last book, London, was published in 1998. In 1999 he made an exhibition at the Julio González Center of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) and published a retrospective catalog of his work.

Larraín’s work can be found in various museums and collections, such as the MOMA in New York or the Laganne Water Castle in Toulouse. At the end of the sixties he moved to Ovalle, where he gradually abandoned photography and deepened in the study of oriental culture and mysticism.