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Sergio Larrain and “Valparaiso”

Sergio Larrain and “Valparaiso”

In Don Delillo’s play “Valparaiso”, an everyman becomes a media star simply because he gets on the wrong flight. Instead of going to Valparaiso, Indiana, he takes a jet for Valparaiso, Chile. The story is told entirely in the form of a series of interviews in which the unfortunate man tries to define himself in terms of his unwanted celebrity. In the end, we never get to find out what Valparaiso, Chile is really like. So it was with interest that I saw a small, cloth-bound book in a bookshop the winter before last with the handwritten words “Valparaiso” on the cover. This, it turns out, was Sergio Larrain’s “Valpariso”.

Larrain was a interesting character: born into a wealthy and privileged family, he decided quickly that he would not follow the path that had been pre-ordained for him. Attracted to a nomadic photographic life, his photographs quickly brought him attention and he became friends with Cartier-Bresson who invited him to join Magnum. At Magnum, he tried photojournalism, and was remarkably successful, managing to get an impossible photograph of a well-known Italian mafia figure by posing a tourist. And then, after only a few short years, he returned to south America, bought a house in a remote hilltop village in Northern Chile, and retreated from the world. He felt that he could not be a professional photographer at Magnum. But there was one place he continued to photograph, and that was the port city of Valparaiso. A small book of those photographs had been published in 1991 and had become legendary amongst photographers and commanded exorbitant prices on the second-hand market.

However, Larrain became increasingly reluctant to publish his work and be interviewed, and it was only after his death in 2012 could one even think about publishing his photographs. He corresponded closely with Agnès Sire at Magnum, and had even sent her an updated version of his book. And so, the Valparaiso that was published in winter of 2016 is an expanded version of that 1991 book, and includes photographs that Larrain took throughout his whole life. You can see a few photographs from the collection Over on Magnum.

I bought this book when it was published a year ago, and I return to it often. The rationalist part of me does not know what to make of Larrain’s talk of the cosmic consciousnesses and his obsession with yoga (he apparently gave yoga lessons during his visits to the Magnum offices in Paris). The photographs, however, have their own logic and charm. I am not sure I am so keen on all those macro shots of flowers and droplets of water, but the message behind them is straightforward and compelling enough. You must observe, you must see things that no-one else sees, and if you do, wonders may possibly be revealed to you. Most photographs are quiet photographs taken with a normal lens and they insist that you look at them carefully. But go just a little deeper, and the understated photographs have more meaning than they seem to at first.

No, this is not a Sergio Larrain photograph, but there are steps and some close-ups.

Larrain’s book is not a reportage about life in Valparaiso, although looking at the pictures you do get some sense of what that place might be like. People go up and down stairs, boats arrive and depart. But you see, he is finely attuned to the strange things that can happen in any place if you look hard enough. At the start of his career he realised that Valparaiso was a fine place for such things: at the exact moment he was taking a picture of a young girl with a bob haircut, exactly the same girl stepped into the frame. A double. That is what photography seems to be about: to be able to create situations where the unexpected may happen.

It has been observed countless times how surprisingly difficult it is to take photographs worth looking at. Today, this is even more confusing because cameras will make all the decisions for you — with the exception of where to point the camera, which is the most important one. Looking at Larrain’s book I found it could be considered as an interesting reflection on what a good photograph might be, and how one might find them. One could not ask for more from a book of photographs.

Josef Koudelka: “La fabrique d’Exils” (Centre Pompidou, Feb 22-May 22nd 2017)

Josef Koudelka: “La fabrique d’Exils” (Centre Pompidou, Feb 22-May 22nd 2017)

Koudelka is the last. In an interview with a the journalist Sean O’Hagan in 2008 he tells this story “‘Once, Henri [Cartier-Bresson] rang me in Paris and said, “Josef, Kertész is in town, you must come to dinner and meet him.” He held Kertész in the highest regard as a photographic master. I said, “Henri, I love his pictures but I do not need to meet him.” The phone goes down. Then he rings back and says, “No, you do not understand, you have to meet him because we three, we are of the same family.” At the time, this seems to me to be an unbelievable thing to say. Now, though, when I look back from a distance, I can see that maybe there is something in that.’

Each of these three photographers made their own unique and vital contribution to photography. Although the oldest, Kertsesz was the most modern (Koudelka’s words). Cartier-Bresson was of course the master of lightly ironic, perfect compositions and “photoportraits”. He managed to be invisibly present at many of the defining moments of twentieth century history, taking pictures of those who were there and not the thing that was happening. Koudelka, like Kertész, was a rootless exile with an approximate command of language. But unlike Kertész, he never did a job he didn’t want to do. And Koudelka is the last of these three still alive.

We are fascinated by creation and the artistic act. We always wonder how the sculptor reveals the head buried in the block of marble. We want to know what the trick is, how it’s done. What’s behind the curtain. Here in Paris, Josef Koudelka recently gave a selection of prints to the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg). These works form the basis of a new exhibition, “le fabrique des exiles”, which runs until May. Yes, it is in some senses a “making of” of one of the great photography books of the 20th century, “Exiles”. The book is accompanied by a essay by Koudelka’s friend and collaborator of 40 years, Michel Frizot, which follows closely the path that Koudelka took to create his work.

“Exiles” comprises around a hundred black-and-white photographs taken mostly in the 1970s and 80s. Certain have carved a place for themselves in our collective photographic consciousness as deep as any other works from the 20th century. Many of them have a certain strangeness or melancholy; others are graphic and expressionist. Seeing large prints of these photographs in Beaubourg amplifies their power. The grain becomes razor sharp, the blacks become inky black. There is that lost dog silhouetted in a wasteland of grimy winter snow at the Parc de Sceaux or outline of a man with an umbrella and flowers against the graceful curves of a wall somewhere in Europe.

Spain, 1973

The broad details of Koudelka’s life are well known. The publication of his pictures of Russian tanks rolling into Prague in the spring of 1968 made “P. P. – Prague photographer” an international celebrity — and especially someone highly sought after by the communist authorities in his native Czechoslovakia. Soon enough, there would be a trip abroad from which he would not return, transforming him too into a perpetual exile. He would spend the next decades photographing at festivals and country fairs in a half-dozen different European countries.

He was not interested in the events themselves but rather what was happening at the periphery, the edges. Before and after. He was not an anthropologist, and this work was not reportage.

Frizot reveals Koudelka’s notebooks. Trained as an engineer, Josef K. planned his journeys with meticulous precision, and one can see these detailed agendas. But there are also other wonders, such as the chart of constellations together with details on the stars and planets. A useful thing to have if you need to get somewhere.

He traveled with almost no possessions and made no place his home, sleeping outside in the spring and summer and in the Paris Magnum offices or at friends’ houses in the winter which he’d spend developing or printing from the many rolls of films taken that year. He said that he didn’t want to take pictures of people who were worse off than him, although his aim was too low: the gypsies at least lived in caravans and had television and heating whereas he slept outside every night and had one pair of trousers for the whole year. In the exhibition we see for the first time self-portraits of Koudelka asleep on office floors or outside the ground in the open air, sometimes a city skyline or a stand of trees in the distance behind him.

Star-chart (Carnet-Agenda 2005, Archives Koudelka, Ivry-sur-Seine)

That is the romantic image, the vagabond artist creating effortlessly great art. But in reality the amount of work required was staggering. Each year Koudelka would shoot more than a thousand rolls of film. Over a twenty year period, that amounted to more than 300,000 images — and from that, only around a hundred pictures found their way to Exiles. Most years would only result in a few images. Photography is ultimately a work of selection, and Koudelka was merciless in selecting images from his own work. On the contact sheets, images were graded into categories, with only the ultimate, highest category leading to possible inclusion in a book. One must learn to be a good critic, and in fact I learned that Koudelka was the only photographer at Magnum who responded to Cartier-Bresson’s request for criticism.

Koudelka is the last, and his work has not been exhibited in any significant way Paris for many years. I hope that one day before too long we will have a retrospective of his work. Recently, Koudelka has returned to the panoramic images which have fascinated him since his early days in Prague; these images would certainly benefit from gallery space. But today, it is wonderful to see these photographs from Exiles on the walls of Beaubourg, and I will try to return again before the end of May.