Sergio Larrain became an independent photographer after a family journey through Europe and the Middle East. He spent a year in London, from 1958 to 1959, and, after meeting René Burri and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he joined Magnum Photos in 1960. He carried out a number of reportages for the agency. Once back in Chile, Valparaiso, where he took many photographs, became the focus of his entire attention. Here he produced, with the poet Pablo Neruda, a major photographic essay Valparaiso, which was published thirty years later on the occasion of his exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles in 1991. In 1999, after several exhibitions were presented around the world, he withdrew from the art scene and its accompanying media coverage. Living in isolation since the 1970s in his house in Tulahuén, in Chile, he died there on 7 February 2012.