Inspiration: Sara Facio

We know several of his photographs of Pablo Neruda, and the portrait of Julio Cortázar with a cigar balanced on his lips is the best-known image of the author of Hopscotch. But many other giants of South American literature have posed before Sara Facio's lens, as well as musicians, politicians and street people who have become immortal in her photos.

Over more than five decades, Sara Facio has developed clean and direct photography, without gadgets, that reflects her time and those characters who most moved her generation.

The first Chilean retrospective of his work brings together 141 photographs at GAM, mainly portraits of fundamental figures in 20th century Latin American culture. Between 1960 and 2005, Facio photographed writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, María Elena Walsh, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Sábato, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alejandra Pizarnik, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicanor Parra and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others.

The series “De brujos y hechiceras (1990-2005)”, meanwhile, parades singers and actresses such as Susana Rinaldi, Norma Aleandro, Mercedes Sosa and Celeste Carballo in this exhibition; in addition to the cartoonist Quino, the jazz player Duke Ellington, the chess player Bobby Fischer and the greatest duo of tango: Roberto Goyeneche and Astor Piazzolla.

Of the portraits of Pablo Neruda - with which the Argentine woman published three books - the exhibition has separated a selection of forty-one photographs taken between 1968 and 1973, and which show the poet in various poses on Isla Negra, in the affectionate company of Matilde Urrutia, in front of a notebook with his writings, and with friends such as Jorge Edwards, Mario Vargas Llosa and Salvador Allende.  

Street photographs of cities such as Paris, New York, Barcelona, ​​Antigua (Guatemala) and, of course, Buenos Aires complete this exhibition that reserves an interesting political space in the photos about the return to Argentina and then the funeral of Juan Domingo Perón. Art, politics and emotions are naturally integrated in the work of Sara Facio, a photographer whose perspective is also that of our time.

An exhibition organized by Fundación Neruda and GAM.
Management and curatorship: Cristina Alemparte.