Elsewehre, like a dream

“It was enough for him to say to himself: I will no longer be here; I will be elsewhere. Elsewhere: it was a word even more beautiful than the most beautiful names. » Simone de Beauvoir in The Mandarins, 1954

The photos express the expectation: of an elsewhere, of a departure, of an arrival, of a mystery to be elucidated, expectation of nothing. In a chaotic slide, made of turns and detours, which goes from Lisbon to Odessa, via Tangier, Marseilles, Istanbul, Antwerp or Trieste, we are between two (banks), in suspension. "To wait for the slightest thing, we have an infinite power of waiting which seems to be inexhaustible..."
If Sergio Larrain quickly took a step back from his photojournalistic activity, there is no doubt that his work on Valparaiso, the fruit of years of poetic wanderings, takes on a documentary character, on the life of this mythical port: documentary and poetic. "Each stone, each staircase, each sailor, each shadow or each bar thus becoming an inseparable element of the vocabulary of the broad poem he wanted to write..." (Agnès Sire ).