Sergio Larraín is one of the most complex photographers we can meet. His figure is surrounded by the mysticism of those who live outside of social conventions. The Magnum agency bet on him, but he held out for a short time. In the documentary ‘Sergio Larraín, the eternal moment’ by director Sebastián Moreno Mardones, we will know all its secrets.
This documentary that tells the life and work of a unique and unclassifiable author can be seen on Filmin, one of the best film platforms. And if we see the rating it has on the part of the public, a 9, we can think that we are facing one of the best photography documentaries in recent years.
Few people understand how he disassociated himself from photography and opted for a life far from vanity and ego that he had breathed while living in Europe with the camera on his shoulder. He came from Chile and found himself in the midst of the maelstrom of success and commitments that came from belonging to the elite of photography.
And something happened inside him that led him to hide and take refuge forever in the north of his land until he died in 2012. Everything around him is a mystery. And many lament that a photographer who was destined for success left his camera hanging.
The documentary about a photographer who didn’t want to be
Many of us adore his work. His clean and original look. But many of his teammates consider that he was wrong to retire because he could have gone much further. In the documentary the great Josef Koudelka says:
He was enormously talented, but incomplete. You have not done a complete job.
It is the perfect story of Icarus, who brushed the sky with his wings but ended up falling. And not because he thought he was immortal, but because it wasn’t the life he wanted. And I consider it to be one of the most respectable things a human being can do.
You need to see the documentary to know which side you take. And it was very difficult for the director to tell the full story, because his own friends decided to follow the path he set. His life is private and his reasons for abandoning everything too.
Thanks to the collaboration of the Magnum agency, which maintains most of its archive (I was unaware that there is a lot of material still undiscovered), it has been able to reconstruct the story of a man full of lights and shadows, like his own images that never stop posing us questions.
The director Sebastián Moreno Mardones, will sound familiar to many for his first work ‘The city of photographers’ (2006). There he recounted the lives of the photographers who worked during the Pinochet dictatorship as the only act of freedom that could be allowed.
Now he tries to explain the life of Sergio Larraín as no one has ever done. He went from photographing like the rest of us dream to seclude himself in the town of Tulahuén to give yoga courses. Do not miss it.