Valparaiso Romantic and Anarchic

This series didn't start with a camera. It started with two books. Sergio Larraín's Valparaíso was the first — those photographs stayed with me long before I ever walked the city myself. Then there was Roberto Ampuero's El Caso Neruda. His detective, Cayetano Brulé, is drawn in by the city's tangled streets and its strange, resigned people, without knowing, at first, the weight of its history. Ampuero builds a Valparaíso that's as much invented as real — a place shaped by his own fiction as much as by its actual streets.

And there's the real history behind it too: Valparaíso was one of the main centers of Chile's anarchist and labor movements from the late 1800s onward, a port town that grew fast and messy, and that still carries that attitude in how it looks and how people move through it.

There's a letter Larraín wrote to his nephew in the 1980s, mostly advice on street photography. He talks about setting out like a boat letting its sails loose, wandering all day through unfamiliar streets, sitting under a tree when tired, buying a piece of bread or a banana, taking a train without knowing where it goes. He describes Valparaíso as a kind of magic you have to lose yourself in for days before anything worth photographing shows up. Between Larraín's vision and Ampuero's fiction, I wanted to see if I could find that same city — the one that pulls you in before you understand it.

So I spent many days there walking up and down, no map, no list, sitting on a step for twenty minutes because a doorway looked right, following a street because it looked interesting, not because it led anywhere.

In 2011 I exhibited this work at the museum Casa Mirador Lucas in Valparaíso, curated by Marcelo Greco. Instead of writing my own wall text, we paired the photographs with lines pulled straight from Ampuero's novel — about porteños who'd learned that luck, good or bad, was always waiting around the next corner or the next flight of stairs; about how you could always go up or down, and nothing stayed fixed for long. Roberto came to see the show and said finding his own city in someone else's photographs felt like meeting an ally. Greco, who wrote the catalog essay, called it two fictions meeting — his invented Valparaíso and my photographed one — to make something like a third, even more imagined city.

That's still what these photographs are to me. Not a document of Valparaíso, but what happened when I walked it with Larraín's vision and Ampuero's fiction both already in my head.

Marcelo Greco’s exhibition’s essay:

"Literature and Photography – A Fictional Game

Photography is a form of human expression very close to literature. The use of a specific language that seeks to represent facts and construct stories through the author's perspective makes them closely related and often inseparable.

While literature has, in its basic structure, a clarity of meaning — though often transformed — photography has in the image an imprecise and open structure, and for that very reason is often more complex for the viewer to grasp.

Marcelo Lessa's work is a good example of this deep intimacy and relationship between these two languages. Inspired by a book by Roberto Ampuero and utterly seduced by the slopes and alleyways of Valparaíso, the author builds his own imaginary version of this mysterious city — one that has much more to do with his own fantasies than with the reality actually present there. One need only look at his images and search for these places in the city. A game of pure fantasy, far removed from the documentary record it might initially appear to be. The same happens with Ampuero's book. Through fictional characters with a strong pull toward the real, Ampuero builds a fantastical universe in which Valparaíso is not the port city in Chile, but rather a place of the fantastic, populated by equally fantastic characters.

Thus Ampuero's imaginary world meets Lessa's imaginary world, constructing Valparaíso – Romántica y Anárquica, a third fiction, even more fantastical still."