Paz Errázuriz

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, 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.