Patricio Guzmán Campos, photographer: close to close with architecture: Photographs of the work of Suárez, Bermejo and Borchers
Keywords:
Copelec, elementary project, brutalism, robustness, transparency.Abstract
In the context of a publication of the Spanish magazine Hogar y Arquitectura on architecture in Chile, the photographer Patricio Guzmán Campos was hired to produce the images of the works of Borchers, Bermejo and Suárez. Guzmán’s work is approached as a melee with the buildings, in a task of corporeal intermediation, suggested by one of Borchers’ texts. The general context of the publication is addressed; then, meeting points are established between the seismic aspect of Chile, photography and architecture as precedents to situate the production of architects and, closing the introductory part, associating the brutalist syntax with the visual approaches to the architecture of the sixties. In the central part, 18 photographs of the headquarters of the Chillán Electric Cooperative and the Meneses house are examined, in a reading guided by the photographic experience of the author, the drawings and plans of the works and the written correspondence between the architects. It concludes with a reflection on the narrative construction of the photographs, necessary to establish the photographic intermediation between the texts, the drawings and the plans that inform the works of architecture.