Larraín photographs a man who has just come down the stairs of the Baker Street tube station. The composition is like a commentary on a painting by the Belgian Delville. In the painting, people rise from hell or descend into it and their naked bodies glisten like a whirlwind. In Larraín’s photograph, people go up and down the stairs into the tube with the same pomp and circumstance, with the same remoteness, with the same half-thoughtful, half-sad expressions on their faces.
From this perspective, London Bridge, complete with doubledecker bus and monstrous columns that plunge into the cold dark water, assumes the guise of hell-bridge: a bridge along which shadows scurry and beneath which water flows (water is almost always disturbing when photographed by an artist) with the majesty and arrogance of death. I say monstrous, hell, shadows, majesty, death, though none of these words should be read with emphasis, but instead in a casual tone, just as Larraín photographs them.
Anyway, disquieting chance flits across the photograph more than once, as if to allow us to discover it, to glimpse its face composed of air, its smile composed of air, the sovereign robes in which it’s wrapped, and in which, magnificent and cold, it wraps us. As if chance were a synonym of hell. Or worse yet: as if chance were the essence of hell, its inner workings, its walls, its holes that swell like eyes.
Sometimes one has the sense that Larraín operates in the midst of indifference, feigning indifference, though he’s positively disposed toward any accident. Sometimes one has the sense that his strength (a youthful strength) is close to failing. But his strength never fails because it stems from grace. The gracefulness of chance.
Larraín photographs seven men walking along a sidewalk. Some are wearing bowler hats. They probably work in the City. The one in the middle of the photograph vaguely resembles or reminds one of Winston Churchill. Six of the men are in focus. The seventh, the one on the far right, is out of focus, and one might say he stepped into the frame at the last minute. But that’s impossible. The other six are walking at a good clip, so if someone suddenly stepped into the picture it couldn’t have been any of them. The seventh, though I can’t say for sure, looks like a doorman or a maintenance man. The seventh looks like ectoplasm gone astray, gazing at Larraín’s photograph from behind the photograph. On the opposite sidewalk, other men (whom we don’t see head on) are walking toward their banks or offices. The seventh man is therefore a kind of mirror. A living (and empty) mirror able to appear at any point in the story and comment on chance from the vantage point of chance itself.
But the men in bowler hats, and even those without bowler hats, also know how to be alone. To be alone is essentially to travel and Larraín shows them on their urban journeys: fearsome beings who make their way through the fog, men in coats, bowlers, and umbrellas who stride, majestic and stolid, through places where few venture to go, much less tourists, unless that tourist is Larraín. And here we can even conjecture wildly: those sad men, reasonably well-dressed, miraculous incarnations of an utter absence of doubt, are they accidental characters or has the young Chilean Larraín followed them, stealing along like a spy or haranguing them, from crowded streets to lonely streets, from the farthest and blackest corners of the river or the suburbs, with the intention, when the moment comes, of photographing them? Are they strangers to Larraín? Maybe. Most are seen from behind. All are absorbed in the contemplation of a scene that may be either exterior or interior: the immaculate room of a despondent I. And yet one of them, I think, is looking straight at Larraín at the moment he takes the photograph: this man, wearing bowler hat, coat, and tie, walks with the gravity of an astronaut. For an instant one has the sense of having arrived, years earlier, on a distant planet in our solar system, a distant and elusive planet. Hidden behind his dark glasses are probably reddened, sleepless eyes. It’s likely that in Larraín this space traveler has recognized his equal.
In some photographs there seems to be no air. The atmospheric pressure is fierce. People move like sleepwalkers, hearts and lungs each going their own way, unbound. In some photographs I can imagine the young Chilean photographer in a polychromed aluminum wheelchair, navigating the streets of a dream that resembles a city called London but is less a city then an array of speeds. I can imagine Larraín, his face covered in tiny scars as if he had cut himself that morning shaving or as if he didn’t know how to shave. In some photographs it’s Larraín who seems to be inside a fishbowl photographing a vast and vaguely familiar planet.
This is off the subject, but when I was a boy and even an adolescent, people said that Chile was the England of South America (in the same way that Uruguay was the Switzerland, Buenos Aires, Chicago, etc.). Those who claimed this, of course, were Chilean. After 1973 the joke stopped being funny, or became what it had always been: sarcastic. But comparisons are never innocent and after a while they return or their ghosts return: in new trappings, with new frills, with new meaning. They return as doubts. They return as answers. In October 1998 the smug joke of our adolescence, that tedious joke, turned up again. Now England, in its leisure moments, dresses up as Chile and in those images of England, in that English hospitality, we Chileans seek our perfect adolescence (our laughter, in other words, and our carefree existence), but we find nothing. Or maybe we do find something: ugly shadows that belong to us, impossible images from the late 1950s or the mid-1960s, when we could still see things in a different way.
Larraín photographs a parked car and it seems to be going more than sixty miles an hour.
Larraín photographs deserted streets and those streets seem to be emerging from being or nothingness, noiselessly, as if in outer space.