Dare to Look

When the photographer Paz Errázuriz moved to the United Kingdom to study at the Cambridge Institute of Education in 1966, she was in her early twenties and came with a youthful impatience to get away from her homeland of Chile. She then returned to Chile to study at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, before taking employment as a primary school teacher. In 1973, Errázuriz was forced to leave her job following the US-backed military coup by General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow the democratically-elected socialist government under President Salvador Allende. As a union member, Errázuriz was considered unfit to be a teacher, and instead, turned her attention to photography. So began her work as a self-taught and internationally-renowned photographer whose extensive body of work spans over more than five decades. From the early 1970s on, Errázuriz captured life on the margins under the dictatorship which lasted until 1990 (Pinochet was overthrown following a 1988 Chilean referendum during which a majority of voters opposed the extension of his unelected presidency). These include photographs of rough sleepers, political protestors, circus performers, wrestlers and sex workers. In the years after Pinochet, Errázuriz has continued to depict life on the fringes of Chilean society, photographing disparate communities including an Indigenous seafaring tribe in Chilean Patagonia and people living in remote villages where rare congenital vision conditions are common.

Now aged 81, Errázuriz has flown over from Chile for the opening of a retrospective of her work at MK Gallery, presented in partnership with the Spanish non-profit organisation, Fundación MAPFRE. Dare to Look is the first solo exhibition of Errázuriz’s work in the UK, with 171 photographs on show taken between the early 1970s and the present day. Seated in the gallery café following the press tour of the exhibition, Errázuriz finds a moment to speak to Pooleyville, where she reflects on her return to the UK. She describes the experience as something of a ‘shock’—returning in old age with a lifetime’s body of work on display, and no longer the young woman who had always wanted to try her hand at photography. It was during her time in Cambridge that a fellow student showed her how to develop film in a makeshift darkroom (the student, Errázuriz recalls, took and printed a black and white photograph of her young baby as a keepsake). Errázuriz speaks fondly of this encounter with photography while living in Cambridge, with a warmth in her voice that extends to how the photographer discusses the work on display at MK Gallery.

During the press tour of Dare to Look, a crowd gathers around Errázuriz to hear her recollections of La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple), a series made with LGBTQIA+ sex workers in the Chilean cities of Santiago and Talca between 1982–87. As Errázuriz explained, she had begun photographing cis female sex workers who, out of fear of being identified, dissuaded the photographer from publishing these images. Instead, Errázuriz turned her attention to photographing queer sex workers living in the same brothel; already existing on the fringes of society and subject to persecution and police brutality, they were willing participants in the series. As such, La manzana de Adán focuses on the lives of Mercedes Paredes Sierra, who lived with her two sex worker children, Evelyn (also known as Leo-Leonardo) and Pilar (Keko-Sergio) at La Palmera brothel in Santiago. Evelyn, Pilar and their friends and colleagues who feature in La manzana de Adán were active collaborators with Errázuriz, and in doing so, the series bears witness to their existence. Published as a photobook in 1990, La manzana de Adán combined images with interviews and texts by the writer Claudia Donoso to give voice to the sex workers’ experiences. Many of the photographs from the series—including those on show at Dare to Look—capture colourful scenes of everyday life taken in domestic settings. In one collection of images, Errázuriz documents a group day trip to Talca for a boat ride and a picnic along the Rio Claro.

Speaking at MK Gallery, there is restrained anguish as Errázuriz recounts the experience of making La manzana de Adán. She fondly recalls how, when she developed and enlarged black and white keepsake portraits for the sex workers, they would adorn the photographs with colourful decorations. But by the time that La manzana de Adán was published in 1990, the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was impacting upon the community of LGBTQIA+ sex workers with whom Errázuriz had forged a deep bond. As Errázuriz notes, these were people who had survived persecution and brutality under the Pinochet dictatorship— the US-backed coup sought to reverse sexual liberations of the 1960s and homosexuality remained criminalised in Chile until 1999—and who were now also at risk of an illness that carried stigma even in more progressive nations. All but one of the contributors to La manzana de Adán have since died of AIDS-related illnesses; Errázuriz remains in contact with the sole surviving sex worker, Coral, who appears in a sequence of three striking, and almost surrealist, images that depict the process of dressing. As Errázuriz tells the crowd gathered around her where images from La manzana de Adán are on display, her first phone call each New Year’s Day is from Coral.

What is clear from looking at the photographs on display at Dare to Look and listening to Errázuriz speak, is how photography can be an immensely personal process. When asked whether she began photographing life under Pinochet out of a sense of obligation to document the lives of those less able to do so, Errázuriz demurs. Instead, she says, the camera was a tool that enabled her to look at—and to learn about—the world around her. Errázuriz cites her exposure to feminism as one such example, recalling something of a double encounter, where she would march alongside feminists protesting on the streets for a couple of blocks before rushing ahead to then photograph the protestors coming towards her from a distance. Or, in the case of ‘Día de la mujer’ (‘Women’s Day’, 1985), from above: standing atop of a building in Santiago, Errázuriz documents members of the Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life) movement protesting against the dictatorship who are met by the brutal force of water cannons unleashed by the police. It is a rare image in that it lacks the warmth that is otherwise so present amongst Errázuriz’s oeuvre.

More than that, ‘Día de la mujer’ is a rare image of Errázuriz’s that explicitly depicts brutality and oppression under military dictatorship. How to visually depict an oppressive regime under which thousands were forcibly disappeared (and the tens of thousands more who were tortured)? Instead of showing scenes of violence, Errázuriz draws attention to what is seen and what is unseen. This is a recurring theme throughout Dare to Look, which begins with photographs from the series Los Dormidos (The Sleeping), in which Errázuriz photographed rough sleepers in Santiago between 1979–80. Though it is not always clear if the subjects are homeless, these documents of poverty on the streets of Chile quietly subvert an image of power and authority perpetuated by Pinochet. But while series such as this attest to Errázuriz’s attempts to challenge the dictatorship, they also speak to a broader inaction in society that the photographer sets out to challenge—a tendency to wilfully, intentionally, look the other way. As Errázuriz explained in a 2024 interview with the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle in Switzerland, these images enabled the photographer to open her own eyes to the world around her: ‘The protected little Catholic girl with a privileged upbringing who didn’t have permission to see, now finally began to see.’ By extension, Errázuriz’s photographs implore others shielded from the reality of life under Pinochet not to look away.

There are parallels to be drawn with both the Vejez (Old Age) and Niños (Children) series, in which Errázuriz draws attention to how the very old and the very young are invisible in society. Photographs of the former, taken during the Pinochet dictatorship, highlight how the elderly are shunned from everyday life and their contributions to society sidelined. By contrast, in her images of the latter, which were taken in the immediate aftermath of the dictatorship, Errázuriz suggests that the conditions under which the future generations will live have not sufficiently changed for the better. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Indeed, in ‘Calbuco’ (2000), a photograph on display in Dare to Look, Errázuriz photographs a child perched on the edge of a bed—too young to know, or perhaps to even have lived under the dictatorship—wearing a mask of the former military dictator.

Masks are a recurring motif throughout Dare to Look—in some series, these masks are literal, and in other works, they are implied. In ‘Women for Life’ (1989) from the series Protestas, Errázuriz captures a procession of protestors whose faces are concealed by handheld masks, a method of resistance used by women opposing the dictatorship that emerged in the 1980s (the face of one protestor without a mask remains somewhat obscured by a pair of large sunglasses). Masks feature prominently in both Boxedores: El combate contra el ángel (Boxers: The Fight Against the Angel) from 1987 and the subsequent series Luchadores del ring (Ring Fighters), made between 2002–2004. The former body of work is significant in that Errázuriz, as a female photographer, was initially denied access to this world of masculine sporting before being awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 to complete the project. In her images of luchadore wrestlers in northern Chile, Errázuriz photographs her subjects away from the ring—and all its macho connotations—and instead photographs them surrounded by their families. Here, the masks that are synonymous with luchadore wrestling are situated in an unfamiliar context that reaffirms how deeply embedded they are within a culture. Errázuriz does not try to unmask her subjects, but to understand why we wear masks; to return to La manzana de Adán, for example, make up forms an integral part of defining a sense of self. Similarly, in the 2004 series Memento Mori (Remember You Must Die), Errázuriz photographs the painted portraits commissioned by family members for tombstones which capture a sense of how we remember those no longer with us.

But who decides what we remember, as individuals and collectively? For the 1995 series Los nómadas del mar (Nomads of the sea), Errázuriz photographed the Indigenous Kawésqar people living on Wellington Island in the southern Chilean Patagonia. In the late nineteenth century, the Kawésqar people were subject to colonial violence and exposed to disease that threatened their existence as a seafaring tribe. For Errázuriz, these photographs are a riposte, then, to narratives of Chilean society that neglect Indigenous people’s claims to the land—and sea—and which gloss over historic acts of brutalisation. Of course, state-directed violence is never just an historic act; it is also always a contemporary one. In the late 1970s, word got around that the disappeared were being detained in psychiatric institutions. Errázuriz searched in vain for missing friends and instead discovered the dire conditions in which people were living. Later, in the 1990s, Errázuriz gained permission to photograph at the Philippe Pinel psychiatric hospital, north of Santiago, where she made two series that grapple with how patients have remade their lives there. For the first series, El infarto del alma (Heart Attack of the Soul), Errázuriz took portraits of couples who had met at Philippe Pinel. Seen in the broader context of Dare to Look, photographs from this series attest to the ways in which people—those who have been stripped of their humanity, and whose livelihoods have been destroyed—seek out moments of humanity, no matter how small.

It is clear that, for Errázuriz, photography has always been a way to reaffirm what it is that makes us human. This is not to gloss over the brutality of life under the Pinochet dictatorship, but to question the sheer absurdity of state-sanctioned violence for political gain. It is also clear that, for Errázuriz, her role as a photographer stems from a choice between, as she tells Pooleyville, ‘[being] generous or being the photographer who wants renown.’ That Dare to Look is the first solo exhibition of Errázuriz’s work in the United Kingdom suggests how the photographer resolved that choice. As does the fact that, having travelled from Chile for only a few days to attend the opening of Dare to Look, Errázuriz describes her work through the relationships that she forged and the people that she met. It is trust, she says, that underpins her work; she cites the series Los nómadas del mar, for which it took Errázuriz years to build a rapport with the Kawésqar people before they felt comfortable with the idea of being photographed.

Inasmuch as the work on show at MK Gallery attests to the extent to which Errázuriz views her subject as an active collaborator, the final series on show, Antesala de un desnudo (Antechamber of a Nude)—the second series made at the Philippe Pinel hospital in 1999—grapples with the boundaries of the photographer’s role. It is a series that suggests that establishing consent is not always clearcut and that the extent to which the subject is an active agent in the construction of an image is not always certain. For the series, Errázuriz photographed nude elderly women patients at the psychiatric hospital within the setting of a rundown communal shower block. To return to a theme that emerges throughout the exhibition, Antesala de un desnudo forces the viewer to question who decides what we see, as individuals and collectively. For Errázuriz, the dire conditions in which these women were living played on her moral conscience, and ultimately, she felt duty bound as a photographer to document and present the series (after images from Antesala de un desnudo were exhibited in the early 2000s, improvements to the institution were made). When Errázuriz dares us to look, it can be to catch a glimpse of small moments of tender humanity—or to bear witness to humanity’s most awful of crimes.