Paz Errázuriz
Paz Errázuriz was born in 1944 in Santiago de Chile,
where she currently lives and works
Paz Errázuriz is a Chilean photographer whose work could be described as a social testimony of the reality in her country. Following a career as an educator, she began her self taught photographic instruction —which she perfected in 1993 at the International Center of Photography in New York— and was a founding member of Chile’s Association of Independent Photographers. Starting to work in the early 1980s, during the military dictatorship of Chile, Errázuriz documented marginalised communities such as sex workers, wrestlers and circus performers. Her intention is to encourage the public to look at the part of reality that society refuses to look at, not in the terms of journalistic photo-realism, but rather in an attempt to subvert the conventions of the visual order, and its traditional values. In 1983 she started her celebrated series of portraits of transvestites, La Manzana de Adán, a project with first publication was possible thanks to a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (1986-1987). Ever since, Errázuriz work has focused in the people that stand outside the center and have always been subordinated to power.
Her work has been shown extensively internationally, with solo shows at the Centro de la Imagen (2022), Mexico City; the Bienal de Guatemala (2021); Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paulo (2020); Barbican Gallery, London (2018); Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2018); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2017); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2017); Fundación Mapfre, Madrid (2015); Berkeley Art Museum (2014) and Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá (2005), among others. In 2015 she represented Chile in the 56th Venice Biennale.
Paz Errázuriz photographs are part of many institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, as well as many private collections.