Santiago in the mirror of time” – 2024-09-11 08:37:34 – 2024-09-11 08:41:04

Book launch “Reflections: Santiago in the mirror of time”

• Biblioteca del GAM, Alameda 227, Metro UC.
• Monday, September 9 – 6:30 p.m.

This book by photographer Miguel Raurich takes us on a journey through time and space in the city of Santiago. The authors of the book’s prologues, photographer Luis Weinstein and architect Sebastián Gray, will be present at the event.

The book is inspired by rephotography (a technique of repeating a photograph of the same place to document the passage of time). In this way, it presents in diptychs or in pairs, photographs of various places and situations in Santiago seen over the years.

Miguel Raurich is a doctor, child neurologist, geriatrician and photographer. He lived in Barcelona for 31 years, during which time he travelled and recorded with his lens every Spanish province and town – along with many others in Europe and Central America – exhibiting his work in monographic books, tourist guides, prestigious magazines (GEO, Travellers, Descobrir Catalunya) and Sunday supplements of newspapers (El País, La Vanguardia, etc.).

Since his return to Chile in 2012, he has continued to combine his two passions: medicine and photography. For ten years, he continued to capture images around Santiago and, at the same time, he carried out an exhaustive search in the historical photographic archives of the old capital, dating back 50 years or more.

Both activities, photographing the city and rescuing part of its graphic heritage, resulted in this book, which was produced with the support of the Archive of the National Historical Museum, the National Library, the Municipality of Providencia, the Enterreno Foundation and the private collaboration of some family archives.

Luis Weinstein: “It is not surprising that this photographer, the son of a forced exile, who spends “his free time” working as a geriatrician in a public hospital, is obsessed with memory as a discursive space for his images, helping the community of this city that welcomes him today and that—luckily for us—he also makes his own, to link present and past as a reflection of one another.”

Sebastián Gray: “This beautiful essay is, on the one hand, a journey through time, and on the other, a journey led by the author through his sensibilities, his humour, his view of places, people and atmospheres, his art. Perhaps also his desires and nostalgia. With the gift he gives us of the obligatory counterpoint between images separated by their eras, he declares to us the inexorable passage of time, the imperishability of some things, memories included, and the transitory nature of others, such as life itself.”