Q. How did you start with photography?
A. It’s been 35 years. The first thing I saw with a photographer’s look was my daughter as she was pregnant undressing. That was my first project and from that point on I have been presenting photos in exhibitions and museums. The truth is that I did not know about photography at that time, but I had a pretty trained look. Sometimes people ask me 'why you look at me so much’. What I’m doing is to observe the picture, the lines of the face. Prior to 1973 –the year of Pinochet's military coup in Chile- I was interested in painting, engraving and drawing. I was a self-taught artist and also had guidance by some major artists and teachers, like Carmen Silva, Thomas Daskam and Adolfo Couve. I had an innate talent for drawing, but I fell in love with photography as I was learning more about it. What really catches you at first is the instantaneousness of photography. Then you realize it is very difficult.
Q. Why?
A. Because of the existing facilities. How do you stand out, if we are all good photographers? Bad photos do not exist.
Q. What would be a bad photo then? A pretentious photograph?
A. And a false one. The photograph by someone with very little talent and little imagination to invent artistic situations. The word ‘artistic’ is very unpleasant. It should be put inside quotation marks, especially in what concerns photography.
Q. Where is the difficulty?
A. Well, in the eye, because everything else is already taken for granted. I’m losing sight and for some years I have been photographing out of focus. This is because my sight is weak now. But photography has never been easier, with autofocus cameras and all that digital stuff... Afterwards you pass the images to Photoshop and correct them. Then, where is the difficulty? In the excess of the existing facilities.
Q. When does a picture move you?
A. This happens to me with some pictures. Those of Sergio Larraín are excellent, real poems. And then there are the press photos taken during the dictatorship (1973-1989), among which there are extraordinary things. I’ll name two: a picture by Alvaro Hoppe in which you see a curtain that rises halfway up to reveal a pair of military boots. Another by Claudio Perez in which you can see a midget passing a picket of heavily armed policemen.
Q. What were you doing during that time?
A. Taking photographs. I never stopped taking them. In those years I presented a very important exhibition at the Galería Sur, with curators Carlos Leppe and Nelly Richards. Paz Errazuriz was exhibiting in one of the halls; in another there was me with three photographs of three meters each, stretched to the extreme out of a 35mm negative.
Q. Why did you do a series of pictures of nuns a while ago?
A. The truth is that I never had noticed nuns, who are obviously little attractive, but suddenly I asked myself what happens with the identity of these people, who make such an unusual choice as women. While I was on that project, I got to know places and wonderful women dedicated to their withdrawal, devotion and study. Adding to this the architecture within which they live and move, the pictures were ready.
Q. They did not resist to the camera?
A. Some were extraordinarily into it, and those in the cloister opened their space to me under certain preconditions. I spent a full day in a convent cloister in Huérfanos Street and I almost wanted to stay there forever in that silence. It was the first time they allowed a photographer to enter so inside the convent. The only thing they asked me was not to take the portrait picture of any nun; I could only take pictures from afar. What I mostly found difficult was to photograph the new nuns, since they were hiding. It is not a matter of me being a good or a bad photographer, but that was a place so wonderful and unexpected. In that same place they were burying them when they were dying, so the nearness to death is a natural question on which we must meditate.
Q. You also photographed high school girls in the street. Both themes, although distinct one to the other, are visually related.
A. This is true, but in what concerns the school girls, I was only interested in that single moment when they were out of school: when they were in the street, on their way from home to school and back. Within that space ‘in between’ they are free. Because in their homes they have rules, just like in their college.
Q. School girls are an immediate urban theme and the city has always been in the background of your photography.
A. I have photographed themes varying from the city to my own life. It might sound narcissistic, but from an artistic point of view I think that my life has been very auspicious, and I was meant to photograph the places where I lived and the things I did, at least this is what I've realized. The nuns have been an intensely lived experience to me.
Q. You have also photographed many poets.
A. Yes, sure, I loved it. I have pictures of poets that are now part of literary history. Rodrigo Lira, for example, of whom there are very few photographs and then he killed himself. I also photographed Jorge Teillier, Raul Zurita, Armando Rubio, Claudio Bertoni, and many others.
Q. Are you taking pictures all the time?
A. I do not have this madness anymore. Anyway, I'm always with projects, and with time I bring them about. Almost all of my exhibitions are covering a period between three and seven years.
Q. Do you ever look back at the photographs of those years?
A. I am constantly sorting and classifying my archives. I’ve come to feel very comfortable in this job and there are always things coming up that I had forgotten about. These are thirty-five years of photographic material and all this builds up in filing boxes and folders.
Q. How would you define the way you look at things?
A. I think the only thing you can say about a way of looking is that it repeats itself and therefore defines a style. What excites me the most are the absurd and unexpected situations, such as what happens in a bus or in a motel, or in front of an old house.
Q. Chilean photography has been heavily influenced by Cartier-Bresson. Have you ever felt you've captured the precise "photographic instant"?
A. Yes, I think I got what you call "photographic instant". Once in a bus, I looked to the side and saw a girl who also looked at me. So I took advantage of that moment, I raised my camera and I took the photo. The mother of the girl did not realize. That is for me a "decisive moment".
Q. When you see that kind of images, you find yourself in an abyss, left with the feeling of loss of an unrepeatable moment...
A. As a photographer I see the opposite: I feel that I have captured what will never ever happen again. I have an obsession with the stories some pictures tell you, with capturing very personal moments of what happens in a city such as Santiago in the 21st century. For example, the photo I took during the Pinochet dictatorship, where you see in a construction site some workers resting by the street. Nobody really wants these guys, not their boss nor the left-wing parties, because nobody feels comfortable with the image of so sensual men in their workplace. I need to record that kind of thing.
Q. When you stared your career in 1973, was it difficult to take pictures in the street?
A. I was not interested in politics by that time, it was a hippie thing to do, although I find this word somehow pejorative.
Q. Not that much.
A. I feel it is pejorative. But really I had a bad time, I was thrown against the wall and witnessed three or four police raids. These were difficult years where fundamental rights were violated. Still, photography served as a refuge and a way to express your discontent with a belligerent system. A lot of things happen to the photographer; I remember once in the Santiago Book Fair there was exhibited a photograph I had taken without any credit. What do you do then? Lawsuit? No, because this exhausts you.