Sergio Larrain, the lost photo

Narrated by journalist and author Catalina Mena (born 1966), his niece, the book explores the life of Sergio Larrain through the prism of his family. In order to solve what she calls "the enigma of this life", the biographical story takes the story from the beginning: from the birth of the artist to his education very much influenced by the world of the arts with his father, a great architect and collector, as well as his various travels which led him to become photographer. One of the axes taken by the book, which allows us to better understand the personality of Sergio Larrain, examines the relationships he maintains with his close to him. How, for example, the complicity he shares with one of his sisters, Luz, will be decisive in the choices that will lead Larrain to retire of the world. The author describes her own relationship with her uncle as mysterious and ghostly: "I have few memories of Sergio," Queco ", as we nicknamed him. He disappeared from the family album at the end of the 1970s, although he had been coming and going for many years. He left for the Limari Valley in central Chile and lived there for over thirty years old. In my mother's family, he is the one I have the least frequented. I never went to see him, but his ghost kept coming back, obsessively, in conversations with loved ones. We, the As children, we heard him spoken of in a mysterious, worried and, frankly, annoyed. We didn't understand anything. "Catalina Mena paints a portrait here intimate and sensitive. It allows the reader to enter the heart of the Larrain myth and to better understand his approach to life and photography. The biography is illustrated by photographs but also by unpublished documents, such as his handwritten poems and letters taken from his long correspondence with Agnès Sire.