The eye / Biography

Native from Santiago Chile (1951), Photographer with academic formation in Visual Arts violently interrupted on September 11, 1973. His vital and permanent restlessness causes him to complete the primary and secondary school in thirteen different educational establishments. During his youth, a trip hitchhiking trough Chile from Chiloé to the border with Peru will be decisive. Afterwards would come trips to Costa Rica, Antarctic, Chilean Altiplano and South Africa. Active member of the ACU (cultural university group) and the AFI (independent photographers group) during the 80s. His reference group has as extraordinary interlocutors Claudio Bertoni and Felipe Riobó. Performs professional work and practice the academic activity with passion and commitment in the Alpes School of Photography. Author of two legendary and essential photobooks: "Mauricio Valenzuela" (Ediciones Económicas de Fotografía Chilena, 1983) y "La niebla" (Ediciones La Visita, 2011) His work is found in important cultural spaces like The Queen Sofia National Art Centre Museum in Madrid Spain.

The rectangle / Esthetics and Work

Located on a territory of a lyrical and existentialism vocation, moving between an ascetic documentalism and allegorical construction loaded of symbolisms. His work is consider one of the most originals during a golden period of the Chilean photography history. His political position as a photographer in the world, some kind of militancy without political party, permeates all his work and defines a high flying poetic. His images of Santiago of Chile during the Pinochet’s dictatorship period are extraordinarily originals and talk, through the resource of the emptiness and the climatological phenomenon, of a dense and oppressive atmosphere that identifies and touches. Among his most originals creations, corresponding to the same period, are "Fotos sin cámara", some kind of narrated images fronting the frustration produce by the impossibility of a photographic story, at the same time proposing an open visual, in which the spectator is not allowed to use the photographer’s place. His most recent work transits through the same vital uncertainties, with new esthetics, coming from the biographic transit of the author and permanently appeal to the current social context.