Tag: black and white

Matthew Rankin, “The Tesla World Light”: Film History Series

Matthew Rankin, “The Tesla World Light”, 2017

“The Tesla World Light” is a eight-minute 2017 black and white avant-garde film by Montreal director Matthew Rankin which imagines the latter days of inventor Nikola Tesla in New York City in 1905. It is a fanciful mixture of elements from Tesla’s life including his pleas to J. P. Morgan for funding and his love for a “electric” pigeon. The film sources interviews with Tesla and letters by Tesla found in the Library of Congress. 

In the film, Matthew Rankin combined pixilation with a technique called light-animation, which involves moving a light source in the frame to produce light rays. He estimated he used as many as fifteen thousand sparklers to produce the effects, along with flashlights, LEDs, and fluorescent lamps.

Matthew Rankin adopted a visual-music approach to the film. He worked with sound artist Sasha Ratcliffe, who recreated Tesla’s device, the Tesla Spirit Radio, which received and transmitted the sound of light waves with the intensity varying according to its vibrations. Much of the background sound in the film was produced by this machine.

Produced by Julie Roy, an executive producer at the Canadian National Film Board, “The Tesla World Light” stars Robert Vilar as Tesla, with cinematography by Julian Fontaine and music by Christophe Lamarche. The film had its world premiere in official competition in May at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was selected for the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

“The Tesla World Light” received an honorable mention in the Best Canadian Short Film category at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and received a listing on Canada’s Top Ten list of short films. It also won the 2018 Canadian Screen Award for Best Animated Short Films.

Christopher Isherwood: “The World Seems So Fresh”

Photographers Unknown,, The World Seems So Fresh

“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” 

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, screen-writer, and playwright who used his expeiences as a gay man for the theme of some of his  writings. Isherwood was born into a privileged lifestyle near Manchester in the north of England in 1904. He developed strong friendships during his boarding school years, later collaborating with school friend Wystan Auden to write three plays : “The Dog Beneath the Skin” in 1935, the 1936 “The Asceent of F6”, and “On the Frontier” in 1938.

Asked to leave Cambridge University in 1925, Isherwood took part-time jobs, briefly attended medical school, and progressed with his first two novels, “All the Conspirators” published in 1928 and “The Memorial” published in 1932. He moved to Berlin in 1929, where he taught English and explored his homosexuality. 

Isherwood ’s  experiences and developed friendships with Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross provided material for his 1935 “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and his 1939 “Goodbye to Berlin”. These were later published together as “The Berlin Stories”, which established Isherwood’s reputation as an important writer and inspired the 1951 play “I Am a Camera” and the 1966 musical “Cabaret”. 

While living in Berlin, Isherwood often returned to London where he took his first movie-script job, working with Viennese director Berthold Viertel on the 1934 film “Little Friend”. He also worked on his book“Lions and Shadows”, published in 1938, a fictionalized  autobiography of his education, both in and out of school in the 1920s. Traveling in January of 1938, Isherwood, accompanied by Wystan Auden, journeyed to China to write his 1939 “Journey to a War” about the Sino-Japanese conflict. 

Isherwood and Auden emigrated to the United States in January of 1939, Auden to Manhattan and Isherwood to Hollywood, where he met and became friends with Truman Capote and British novelist and playwright Dodie Smith. On November 6, 1946, Christopher Isherwood became an American citizen. While living in California with photographer William Caskey, he and Caskey traveled in 1947 to South America, after which they published the 1949 “The Condor and the Crows”, with prose by Isherwood and photographs by Caskey. 

On Valentine’s Day in 1953, at the age of forty-eight, Isherwood met eighteen-year old Don Bachardy on the beach at Santa Monica. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood’s life. During this period they were together, Isherwood, with Bachardy typing, finished his 1954 novel “The World in the Evening” and taught modern English literature at (now) California State University, Los Angeles. The two became a well-known and well-established couple in California society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on the 4th of January, 1986, at his Santa Monica home, aged 81. His body was donated to medical science and his ashes later scattered at sea.

Note: Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel “A Single Man” is considered by many to be his finest achievement. The story depicts a day in the life of George, a middle-aged gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles University. In the novel, the professor, unable to cope with the sudden death of his partner Jim, encounters different people who give him insight into the possibilities of being alive and human in the world. The novel was adapted into the drama film “A Single Man”, in 2009, directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and starring Colin Firth who, for his role in the film, was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

Notes: An interesting, more extensive article on the life of Christopher Isherwood can be found at The Isherwood Foundation located at: https://www.isherwoodfoundation.org/biography.html

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Christopher Isherwood (left) and Don Bachardy”,  late 1970s.

Bottom Insert Photo: George Platt Lynes, “Christopher Isherwood”, 1935, Heliogravure, Private Collection

Sunil Gupta

The Photographic Work by Sunil Gupta

Born in New Delhi, India in 1953, Sunil Gupta is an artist, educator, photographer, and curator. He studied at the London’s Royal College of Art and completed his doctoral program at the University of Westminster in 2018. He has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice since the 1970s focusing on race, migration and queer issues. Gupta’s work has been instrumental in raising awareness around the political realities for international gay rights and the visible tensions between tradition and modernity, both public and private.

In the mid-1970s, Gupta studied under Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research and became interested in the idea of gay public space. It was during this period that he shot his early street series “Christopher Street, New York”, documenting the daily lives of gay men in lower New York City. 

In the 1980s, Gupta constructed his “Exiles” series, consisting of documentary images of Indian gay men in the architectural spaces of Delhi, which with images and texts described the conditions for gay men in India at that time. His series with the fictional name, “Mr. Malhotra’s Party”, was shot twenty years later and updates this theme during a time in which queer identities are more open and also reside in virtual space on the internet and in private parties.

Gay nights at local clubs in Delhi are always sign-posted as private parties in a fictitious person’s name to get around Section 377, a British colonial law, which still criminalizes homosexuality in India. Mr Malhotra is is the ubiquitous Punjabi refugee who arrived post partition and contributed to the development of the city.

Among Sunil Gupta’s published works are the monographs: “Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life” published by Yoda Press, New Delhi in 2008; and “Pictures From Here”, published by Chris Boot Ltd., New York, in 2003. Along with photographer Charan Singh, whose work is informed by HIV/AIDS work in India, Sunil Gupta exhibited in 2008 “Dissent and Desire” at Houston’s  Contemporary Arts Museum, which was accompanied by the book, “Delhi: Communities of Belonging”.

Sunil Gupta is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, and was the Lead Curator for the Houston Foto-Fest in 2018. Gupta’s work is in many private and public collections including, George Eastman House; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum; Tate Museum in London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Note: For those interested in Sunil Gupta’s work, a lecture at the International Center of Photography  by Sunil Gupta on his life and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aPdzwCKvP4

Bottom Insert Image: Sunil Gupta, “The New Pre-Raphaelites 3%”, 2007, Color Print. jpg

Max Dupain

 

Max Dupain, “Tea Towel Trio”, 1934, Silver Gelatin Print, 29.5 x 22 cm

Born in April of 1911 in Sydney, Australia, Maxwell Spencer Dupain was an Australian photographer whose influential style of commercial photography emphasized the geometric forms of his industrial and architectural subjects. He studied at both the East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School between 1933 and 1935, and  apprenticed with commercial photographer Cecil Bostock from 1930 to 1934.

During World War II, Max Dupain worked for the army camouflage unit; upon deployment, he worked for the Australian Department of Information until 1947. When he returned to his studio work, Dupain concentrated on more abstract architectural and industrial imagery instead of his previous portraiture and landscape work. This more abstract imagery established him as one of the most significant Modernist photographers in Australia.

Living in Sydney all his life, Dupain photographed the city from the 1930s until his death in July of 1992. Although traveling a few times abroad, including photographing the Seidler Australian Embassy in 1988, he was chiefly interested in the beaches and cities of Australia. Dupain’s photographic series of Australia’s beach culture are his most enduring images, with his 1937 “Sunbaker”, a low-angle shot of a male sunbather on the beach, becoming an icon of the Australian life.

Simple and direct in his work, Max Dupain, feeling that color was restricting in its objectivity, remained an adherent to black and white photography. His work has been collected by most of the major galleries in Australia and resides in many private collections. Dupain’s work was featured at the Photographer’s Gallery in London to celebrate his eightieth birthday, At the age of eighty-two, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1982. Maxwell Dupain continued his work in photography until his death in July of 1992.

Note: Max Dupain’s collection of twenty-eight thousand archived negatives are now catalogued and preserved in the New South Wales State Library located in Sydney.

James Baldwin: “…Bright as a Razor”

Photographer Unknown, ….Bright as a Razor

“Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don’t know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven’t seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you’d have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day–and this is what is hard to explain–you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you.”

—James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Frederico Garcia Lorca: “I Sing Your Restless Longing”

Photographers Unknown, I Sing Your Restless Longing

“I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.

I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,

riding her bicycle of corals and conches.

But above all I sing a common thought

that joins us in the dark and golden hours.

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.

Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.” 

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the province of Granada, Spain. He studied law at the University of Granada, before entering in 1919 Madrid’s  Residencia de Estudiantes to focus on his writing. 

In Madrid, Lorca joined the “Generation of ’27”, a group of avant-garde artists which included Salvador Dali and surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel. This group introduced Lorca to the surrealist movement, which would later greatly influence his writing. Through this group, Lorca met and developed a long friendship with Dali, who would later design the scenery for the Barcelona production of Lorca’s 1927 play “Mariana Pineda”. 

Lorca published numerous volumes of poetry during his career, beginning with the 1918 “Impresiones y Paisajes”, a prose work in the modernist tradition chronicling his sentimental journeys through Spain as a student. He often incorporated elements of Gypsy culture, Spanish folklore and ‘cante jondos’, or deep songs, in his themes of romantic love and tragedy.

Frederico Lorca’s two most successful poetry collections were “Canciones (Songs)”, published in 1927, and the 1928 “Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)”. “Romancero Gitano” was especially daring for the time with its exploration of sexual themes and made Lorca a celebrity in the literary world. In 1930, he traveled to New York City, where he found a connection between Spanish deep songs and the African-American spirituals he heard in Harlem.

Upon his return to Spain, Lorca co-founded La Barraca, a touring theater company that performed in town squares both Spanish classics and his original plays, including the 1933 “Blood Wedding”. Throughout the 1930s, he spent much of his time working on plays, including a folk drama trilogy:  “Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding)” in 1933, “Yerma (Wasteland)” in 1934, and “La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba)” in 1936. Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer.

In the middle of August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested at his country home in Granada by General Franco’s soldiers. He was executed, shot without trial, by a Nationalist militia squad a few days later. His body was never found.

Frederico Garcia Lorna, due to the inclusion of homo-romantic themes in his work, was heavily censored during his lifetime. Described as a ‘socialist’ and ‘participant in abnormal practices’, he was a target of the Franco-era government and had his work banned in Spain until 1953. Now considered one of Spain’s greatest poets and playwrights, Lorca, in a career that spanned just nineteen years, revitalized the basic strains of Spanish theater and poetry.

“Here I want to see those men of hard voice. Those that break horses and dominate rivers; those men of sonorous skeleton who sing with a mouth full of sun and flint.” 

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Konrad Helbig

Photography by Konrad Helbig

German photographer and archaeologist, Konrad Helbig was born in 1917 in Leipzig, Germany. He was a soldier fighting in the Soviet Union during World War II, was taken in captivity by the Soviet Union, and held until his release in 1947. 

Upon his release, Helbig poured himself into the study of art history and archaeology, especially of the Mediterranean region. After graduation, he worked as writer and photographer for the German travel and cultural magazines “Merian” and “Atlantis”, relating in-depth the nuances of the history, geography, people, and culture of the region to his readers.

Best known for his black-and-white images of young Sicilian men. Helbig posed his subjects, photographing both nude and clothed models, in brightly lit, typically Italian landscapes. His profound knowledge of Mediterranean cultures and the tradition of earlier German photographers, such as Baron William von Gioeden and Guglielmo von Plüscho, can be readily seen throughout his body of work. 

Helbig saw his subjects as incarnating the myth of pre-industrial and Arcadian culture, with its unspoiled, harmonious atmosphere. The postures and forms of Helbig’s nudes are composed from a formal point of view directly related to the classical artistic perfection of Greek and Roman sculptures. In a trial volume for publication compiled in collaboration with the archaeologist Herbert von Buttlar, Helbig interspersed these portraits with images of ancient bronze sculptures

Konrad Helbig’s first published photo collection was his volume on Sicily in 1956, followed by collaborative collections with Karl Heinz Hoenig in 1959 and photographer Toni Schneiders, entitled “Archipelagus”, in 1962. One of Helbig’s best-known collections is “Homo Sun (I am Human)’, published posthumously in 2003, which surveys his boldest erotic work from the 1950s and 1960s. 

Konrad Helbig died in Mainz, West Germany, in February of 1986 at the age of sixty-eight. Notably, the nude photographs for which he is now most famous were discovered posthumously at his home in Mainz.

The photographic works of Konrad Helbig are in the archives of Dresden’s Deutsche Fotothek, which includes 160,000 shots, of which 60,000 are color slides,. Additional works are in the photo archive of Germany’s University of Marsburg, which contains 23,800 shots, of which 11,000 are photographs of Greece and 6,000 of Italy.  Helbig’s work can also be found in the State Archive Hamburg, as well as private foundations and museums in Germany. 

Top Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, “Young Boy in Water, Sicily”, circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print, 30.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, Untitled, (Young Man with Sculpture, Sicily), circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print

Ray Bradbury: “Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay”

Photographers Unknown, Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” 

—-Ray Bradbury

Haruki Murakami: “In the Midst of the Everyday”

Photographers Unknown, In the Midst of the Everyday

“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.” 

—-Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Born in January of 1949 in Kyoto to parents both of whom were teachers, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe as an only child. Since childhood he was heavily influenced by Western culture, reading a wide range of European and American literature, such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jack Kerouac. He moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University, studying drama and graduating in 1973. After college, Murakami married and  opened a small jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, in Tokyo,  which he and his wife ran for seven years. 

Hanuki Murakami’s first novel “Hear the Wind Sing” initially appeared in the June 1979 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, and was published in book form the following month. This first book of the “Trilogy of the Rat” won the Gunzou Literature Prize for new writers in 1979 and was adapted by director Kazuki Ōmori for the 1981 film “Hear the Wind Sing”. Murakami followed this success with two sequels “Pinball, 1973”, published in 1960, and “A Wild Sheep Chase”, published in 1962. 

Murakami achieved national recognition in 1987 with the publication of “Norwegian Wood”, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, which sold millions of copies among the young Japanese. He is also the author of the novels “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”; “Dance Dance Dance”; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle””, and “Sputnik Sweetheart”, among others. He has also written three short story collections: “The Elephant Vanishes”; “After the Quake”; and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”. 

Most of Murakami’s works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese “I-novel”, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. With the family being a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, a central character who is independent becomes one who values freedom and solitude over close connections.

After Japan’s Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, Murakami interviewed survivors, as well as the Aum religious cult responsible for the subway attack. From these interviews, he published two non-fiction books, forming the series entitled “Underground” in 1997 and 2000. While the book consisted mainly of narratives from individuals, it contained common themes revealing aspects of the psyche and values of the Japanese society as a whole.

Hanuki Murakami’s work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society and government. In 2011, Murakami donated his eighty-thousand Pound winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the fukushima nuclear disaster.

A. S. Ryatt: “Moving Out of Time”

Photographers Unknown, (Moving Out of Time)

“So—I went on, on my own—deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride—not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of—certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them—intermittent diamond—but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasing Quiet—and my horse went softly on the beech-mast—which was wet after rain—not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become—all at once, all wound in one—and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. [Randolph Henry Ash]” 

—-A.S. Byatt, Possession

Walt Whitman: “A Glimpse”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Photographers and Artists Unknown, (A Glimpse), Gay Film Gifs

“A glimpse through an interstice caught, 

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, 

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, 

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, 

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.”

—-Walt Whitman, A Glimpse, Leaves of Grass

David Guterson: “The World in Another Time”

Photographers Unknown, (The World in Another Time)

“The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been.  

He knew what had happened to the sage-lands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he’d come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn’t shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.” 

—David Guterson, East of the Mountains

Be Creative

Photographer Unknown, (Be Creative)

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

—-Jim Jarmusch, MovieMaker Magazine #53-Winter, January 22, 2004

Image reblogged with many thanks to: https://theskywaspunk.tumblr.com

Sergio Larrain

Sergio Larrain: The Valparaiso Series

Born in Santiago, Chile, Sergio Larrain was an experimental photographer, considered to be the most important of the Chilean photographers. His depictions of his homeland in the 1950s and1960s were taken with a documentarian’s instinct, the scenes creatively presented with vertical frames, deep shadows and low angles. Most notable were Larrain’s intense images of the children of Santiago living on the banks of the Mapocho River and his series of images which captured the mood of late 1950s London.

After studying music and forestry in the United States, Sergio Larrain, with the assistance of a British Council scholarship, traveled to Europe and the Middle East, working for various European magazines, joining the staff of the Brazilian magazine “O Cruzeiro” in 1956. The images he shot in London during his travels caught the attention of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, a founding member of Magnum Photos, invited Larrain to join the international photographic collective. 

Sergio Larrain joined Magnum Photos in 1959 as an associate, becoming a full member in 1961. After that, Larrain worked in photography professionally for only ten years until 1972. A follower of the Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo, he  retreated from public and professional life to live in the remote mountain village of Tulahuén, where he took up meditation and the art of calligraphy. Sergio Larrain died in Tulahuén on February 7th of 2012.

Of the four photographic books published in Larrain’s lifetime, “Valparaiso”, published in 1991, made the greatest impression on the public and fellow photographers. Sergio Larrain began photographing the famous Chilean port of Valparaiso throughout the 1950s. In 1963, he returned, accompanied by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, to spend more time in the city, exploring and photographing the bohemian lifestyle of the port-side neighborhoods.

Sergio Larrain’s “Valparaiso” was republished in 1993 as an extended edition of the work, which included photographs from the series he had taken in the 1950s. In 2016, a new edition of the work was released by Xavier Barral Editions of Paris which included eighty unpublished images and Larrain’s handwritten and typed notes, letters, and drawings. Through these texts, Sergio Larrain expressed his emotions and his faith in the importance of yoga meditation, revealing the sensitivity extended throughout his work.

Note: Upon being developed, a set of Sergio Larrain’s photographs shot in the 1950s outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris revealed that a couple, unnoticed at the time of the shoot, was in the frame. This discovery provided the inspiration for Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “The Devil’s Drool”, which in turn inspired Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic mystery thriller “Blow-Up”.

Top Insert Image: Sergio Larrain, “School Boys, Santiago, Chile”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Magnum Photos

Middle Insert Image: Rene Burri, “Sergio Larrain, Paris”, 1967, Gelatin Silver Print, Magnum Photos

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Larrain, “El 45, Bar in Balparaíso. Chile”, 1963, Gelatin Silver Print