Valparaiso / Photographies Texte Pablo Neruda

8vo (235 x 165 mm), pp.64. 38 black-and-white photographs, edited by Agnès Sire, design by Xavier Barral. Original brown card wrappers, upper side lettered in red and black, spine lettered in red; faded, light toning to edges, light reading crease to spine. Near-fine.

First edition, issued to coincide with an exhibition at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, 1991. Valparaiso is a study of the Chilean sea port of the same name. Larrain has a strong eye for composition and visual relationships, employing the entire frame, particularly the edges, to produce photographs rich in psychological drama. He describes a good photograph as one ‘created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions… The game is then to organize the rectangle.’ Larrain was born in 1931 in Santiago de Chile. He was invited to join Magnum in 1959, but in the late 1960s he decided to quit photography and has since been living in relative isolation in Ovalle, a small village in the Andes, devoting himself to study, writing, transcendental meditation and Zen Buddhism.

Parr, M. and Badger, G., The Photobook: A History Vol.II, p.102; Auer, M. and M., 802 photo books, p.690.