Sergio Larrain (Agnes-Sire)

Sergio Larrain is Aperture's monograph on the Chilean photographer, edited by Agnès Sire, with more than 200 images that join his work in Latin America to the pictures he made in Europe.

Aperture published it in September 2013 as a 400-page hardback designed by Xavier Barral. Alongside the photographs it prints letters and pages from Larrain's notebooks. Sire corresponded with Larrain for many years and has worked with Magnum on preserving his estate, and she edited the book with the support of his family. The publisher presents it as a correction to his absence from the canon of twentieth-century photography.

Larrain was born in Santiago in 1931 and took up photography in 1949. The Museum of Modern Art bought two of his pictures in 1956, and a British Council grant in 1958 let him photograph London. That year Henri Cartier-Bresson saw his pictures of street children and suggested he work for Magnum. He became an associate in 1959 and a full member in 1961, and returned to Chile that year when Pablo Neruda invited him to photograph his house. In 1968 he met the Bolivian teacher Óscar Ichazo and largely gave up photography to study Eastern culture. He died in Ovalle, Chile, on 7 February 2012.