The photographer who risked death to capture Chile under Pinochet

“Dare to look” is the challenge extended to visitors at a new exhibition of pictures by self-taught documentary photographer Paz Errázuriz, who made it her life’s work to chart the day-to-day experiences of Chileans who for almost 20 years suffered under the harsh regime of General Pinochet.

For 81-year-old Errázuriz, photography “works as a kind of mirror”, and so it follows that she asks of her audience only what she has consistently demanded of herself over the five decades of her career. Still, “daring to look” is too modest a description for her project, because while the phrase admits fear, it suggests a fleeting, rather than a sustained act of bravery. For Paz Errázuriz, there was no momentary girding of loins: “fear is permanent”, she tells me at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, which is currently showing the first major UK exhibition to be dedicated to her work.

Towards the beginning of this career survey of 171 photographs, most of which are original black and white prints, a series titled Protests offers a glimpse of her modus operandi. Viewed from the top of a tall building in downtown Santiago, the monstrous dissonance of protesting women violently put down by water cannon on International Women’s Day in 1985 is clear. Errázuriz’s position of relative safety doesn’t make her detached – instead, it emphasises the surreal horror of what is happening on the street below. The fragility of the women’s bodies is appalling – they might be scraps of cloth in the breeze, or butterflies about to be made sodden pulp in the jet of a hosepipe.

Errázuriz’s viewpoint from up in her eyrie is one more commonly associated with snipers. She is a less lethal sort of watcher, but still dangerous – under a regime where a woman taking pictures was guilty of “contempt for authority”, she compiled a damning body of evidence that gave voice to the silenced. Not only did she exhibit her work in Chile and beyond, but in 1981, she co-founded the Chilean Association of Independent Photographers.

“How did you do it?”, she has often been asked. It’s a question that she does not fully know how to answer, when so many were so brutally and summarily silenced. Undoubtedly, it involved a wily sort of stealth. Perhaps her small stature helped? “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “In Chile, we are all small.” Somehow, she slipped into buildings and up staircases, ducking down alleys, and between houses, as in her picture of the O’Higgins Park Protest, 1985, in which we follow Errázuriz following a protestor, who turns to catch our eye in a moment of suspicion, or solidarity.

Errázuriz’s sense of vocation was galvanised in the opening days of the Pinochet regime, a notoriously brutal military dictatorship that between 1973 and 1990 imprisoned, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people. Almost immediately, Errázuriz was forced to leave her teaching job because of her membership of the Workers’ Union. Then, “five days after the coup, they raided my house, and it was so terrible,” she tells me. “I was so scared. But nothing could be worse than that, so you start to be trained.” 

Trained not just in the brutality of the police, but in the lies that flourish with fear. It was her neighbours who had denounced her, believing that she and her painter husband were hiding a Cuban revolutionary wanted by the authorities.

Errazuris does not picture violence. Even when in the 80s, she made a number of series of pictures of boxers and wrestlers, she was only ever interested in what went on behind the scenes. The result is a series of characterful, sensitive portraits that make the unseen violence of their daily lives all the harder to comprehend.

She does something similar in the street photography that opens this broadly chronological exhibition, a haunting series called The Sleeping in 1979, quietly shocking in its portrayal of a population wrung out by fear. She photographs the homeless and helpless, dozing sometimes, but more often sprawled in the narcotic dead stupor that is an increasingly familiar sight on our own streets. In one unforgettable picture, two sleeping men on benches flank a third. At first glance, he might be dozing too, his chin propped on his hand, his elbow resting on the back of the bench, his eyes shaded by his fedora. But he is more sharply dressed than the others, a somnolent flaneur, finding anonymity in a city escaping into sleep.

The line between the ordinary citizen and the marginalised is rarely clear in Errázuriz’s work, and though she has made her name as the champion of the forgotten and the outcast, it is not a terminology that she appreciates: “I reverse the term ‘minority, ’” she has said. “They are absolutely the majority. The super sophisticated and super-privileged are actually the minority.”

Her photographs of children and the elderly articulate these complexities, for while both were especially neglected during and beyond the Pinochet years, the care homes for the old and mentally ill were rarely, if ever, troubled by the police. The ease with which children and the very old can escape into the imaginary is a frequent theme for Errázuriz, emphasised in a hang that places a portrait of a little girl dressed as a queen next to a group of old people similarly decked out.

The imagination has limits, and there is very little comfort to be found in Adam’s Apple, one of Errázuriz’s most important series in which she worked with LGBTQIA+ sex workers in Santiago and Talca, between 1982 and 1987, as the AIDS epidemic took hold worldwide.

Originally, Errázuriz had set out to document female sex workers, but soon found that the risk of discovery by family members prohibited most of them from agreeing to be photographed. By contrast, their queer friends and colleagues, among them non-binary and trans people, and gay men who dressed as women for their clients, were happy to be photographed – homosexuality was illegal in Chile until 1999, and they were already so stigmatised that they felt they had nothing left to lose.

Unusually, Errázuriz acknowledges that taking a photograph is “extremely intrusive”, and it’s perhaps because of this self-awareness that she has been able to make lasting friendships with her subjects, which in the Adam’s Apple project involved an entire family, and its extended circle. In a community devastated by AIDS, only Coral is left now, a trans woman who in 1987 Errázuriz photographed at her toilet, like a 19^th-century Venus.

The exhibition ends with a conundrum, and rightly so. The eternal question for photographers of people pivots on the line between representation and exploitation, which is too easily blurred in the search for a great shot. The final room tackles this question with honesty, with a troubling series called Antechamber of a Nude, shot in 1999, in the shower block of a psychiatric hospital.

Errázuriz was “terrified” by hellish scenes of agonised, naked women, stripped of their dignity and squashed together in squalid conditions. They were “like concentration camps”, she knew, and she sat on the pictures for five years. Eventually, she decided that they might be used to bring change, and an exhibition in 2004 resulted in a new hospital administration and improvements in patient care. There’s no glib conclusion, though: for Errázuriz, “daring to look” is not about the righteous, macho reporting of atrocities, but about individual lives in the balance. Taking a photograph can be an act of respect and care, but it’s never a given.

Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look is on at MK Gallery Milton Keynes until 5 October