Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look

Errázuriz isn’t chasing the spotlight; she never has. But her images speak loudly, revolutionary and fiercely honest. Born in Santiago in 1944, self-taught and later trained at the International Center of Photography in New York, she has spent over fifty years documenting the lives of those pushed to the margins. Her subjects? The people society prefers not to see: trans communities, sex workers, psychiatric patients, the elderly, and the politically inconvenient.

The exhibition at MK Gallery is expansive, both in quantity and scope: 171 photographs that don’t just trace a career but map a way of seeing. Errázuriz’s lens doesn’t frame victims; it restores dignity, complicates narratives and challenges what we think we know about identity, mental health and visibility.

Among the highlights is La manzana de Adán, a powerful series from the 1980s portraying trans women and sex workers in Santiago (a time when repression, stigma and violence were the norm). Also featured is Antesala de un desnudo, a haunting portrait of psychiatric patients in long-term care, captured with a disarming stillness that resists sensationalism.

This show has been a long time coming. Errázuriz is no newcomer, because she’s been exhibited across Latin America and Europe, won prestigious awards like the Guggenheim Fellowship (1986), the Ansel Adams Award (1995), and the Altazor Prize (2005). In 2015, she represented Chile at the Venice Biennale. Yet the UK had, until now, never given her the full institutional recognition she deserves.

In the words of Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery: “We are thrilled to be working with Paz Errázuriz on this survey of her extraordinary career. With its focus on communities whose voices are rarely heard, the artist's work engages with pressing social circumstances that have never been more resonant than today”.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of talks and workshops that echo the artist’s own ethos: that photography is not just about capturing images, but about listening, connecting, and witnessing. Errázuriz has always worked collaboratively, building relationships with her subjects, resisting voyeurism. Her work doesn’t speak for others, it speaks with them. Her camera, above all, stays. It stays in places others avoid. It stays long enough to listen.