The photographer and doctor, Miguel Raurich, presents this book with photographs that contrast two different times and spaces under the same frame. In this activity, Luis Weinstein, photographer; Sebastian Gray, architect; both prologues of the book, along with Orieta Rojas, member of the Black Boots team, director of the project.
"Miguel Raurich's photographs make us travel through Santiago. A journey that covers some of its neighborhoods, fixing our gaze on details that make us recognize the capital. They are images located in relation to the territory where the author travels, but this book in its edition also adds a temporal journey in the investigation. Each double page installs us in a space that is close in the visual and distant in time. A journey condensed in the ink of its pages.
Photography arrived in Chile on the frigate L'Oriental in 1840 and from that moment our imagination was enriched with this version of images made using industrial technique. The certainty in the line and—along with it—the verisimilitude that we assign to it, has given us a new source for academic studies and, particularly, to nourish our imagination and be able to rethink our present from this particular point of view.
Raurich affirms "my thing is to look", certainly an intentional look when a photograph is generated from that exercise, or a series of them that is completed over time, like the one this book brings us. When looking at his career in photography, it becomes evident that travel is an inherent part of his craft, as has been the case with many who precede him or accompany him on this creative journey. Exile probably accentuated this curiosity to discover what the corners hide, not in the sense of the moment as reporters who construct a synthesis of the news do, but in the everyday life represented in an image, as a patient fisherman would do who fills his basket with fish, following the idea of the letter that Don Sergio Larraín writes to his nephew, when he masterfully explains to him what the photography he practices consists of. (...)
It is not surprising that this photographer, the son of forced exile, who spends "his free time" practicing as a geriatric doctor in a public hospital, is obsessed with memory as a discursive space for his images, helping the community of this city that today welcomes him and that - luckily for us - he also makes his own, to link present and past as a reflection of each other.
Foreword by Luis Weinstein, photographer December 2023
Sep 9, 2024
Mon— 6:30 p.m.
BiblioGAM (Edificio A, piso 3)
Access by invitation only.