CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/18/2013

Best of 2013: Sergio Larrain

In the New York Times 2013 Holiday Book Review, Luc Sante writes, "Sometimes the world of photography books can seem not unlike that of popular music on disc, with endless repackaging of the classics — each new volume containing pictures that haven’t been previously reprinted, so that if you are a devotee or a completist you will have to shell out for another tome. And yet major surprises continue to arrive, dispatches from the past. Consider, for example, the work of the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain (1931-2012), whose career was both extraordinary and unusually abbreviated. It was only after studying forestry at Berkeley that he began seriously taking pictures in the mid-1950s, and then an encounter with the Bolivian mystic Oscar Ichazo in 1968 caused him to retreat for the remainder of his life into meditation and yoga, taking small, quiet photos only occasionally, as complements to his inner quest. But for the decade or so that he was in the world and regularly taking pictures, his work, as amply illustrated in Sergio Larrain (Aperture), edited by Agnès Sire, was a constant source of wonder."