Sergio Larrain

For four months in late 1958 and early 1959, the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain took his Leica camera to London. He was there on a British Council grant to work on a photography project about London. Apart from what we can gather from the photographs he published in his book London, 1959, little is known about his time in the city. But perhaps that’s okay. Larrain’s images — and his life — are appealing because they are shrouded in mystery....

It was a cold, December day when I strolled into a bookstore in France and ran my fingers along the spines of the books in the photography section. My finger stopped on the steel-grey spine of Sergio Larrain’s book Londres, 1959, which I slid off the shelf and thumbed through. As I looked at his enigmatic, contrasty photographs of London — shot on black-and-white film, of course — a wave of inspiration overcame me....