Over the course of four years, between 2017 and 2021, Francisco Mouat sat down to converse with the photographer Luis Poirot. There was no predetermined agenda; nothing resembling a specific topic. His motivation was the curiosity to get to know the man who had taken exceptional portraits of Pablo Neruda, Raúl Ruiz, Ana González, Víctor Jara, Nicanor Parra, Sergio Larraín, José Donoso, Enrique Lihn, and many other names from the fields of theater, cinema, photography, and literature. Also, of course, to learn more about the person responsible for that poignant image of La Moneda bombed after the coup, of houses on the verge of collapse after the earthquake of 1985, or the overwhelming vastness of the landscape of Easter Island. All these images, in black and white. All of them vibrating as only memory does in its resistance to oblivion. 

In an attempt to fix certain memories in the same way that the developing liquid fixes the image captured by the camera, Mouat —a great chronicler against forgetting as well— began to unravel the tapestry of Poirot's memories. As a result, the reader of these pages becomes a witness to a life, a vocation, an art. Thus, we learn that as a child, Poirot had to be confined to a dark room due to an allergy that made him intolerant to light. Or that his father abandoned the family, leading Luis to be, in more than one sense, adopted by Isidora Aguirre and Eugenio Guzmán. We also learn about his time at the Military School and the Faculty of Law before studying theater and discovering photography—much earlier, of course, than his experience of exile and cancer in his left eye. 

Halfway between memoirs and reflections on the craft, between period painting and a tribute to great photographers, this book of conversations with Luis Poirot —which includes a selection of his most cherished photos— surprises with the way it ties together memory, photography, and mystery. Author: Francisco Mouat.