The geography
of immensity
Some countries are travelled through. Chile is a country one must confront with the gaze.
There is something immense about this land. A geography that seems to have been drawn without accepting limits, as if the mountains, the ocean, the desert and the ice had decided to gather within the same narrow strip of the world.
In the north, the desert spreads its bare mountains beneath one of the clearest skies on the planet. The land opens into salt flats, volcanoes and ravines where silence seems to have a physical dimension. Farther south, forests cover the mountains, rivers descend with extraordinary force, and lakes hold the reflection of summits that seem suspended between earth and sky.
And then there is Patagonia.
There, geography takes on another scale. Mountains rise like enormous walls of stone, glaciers descend from the ice fields, and the wind crosses territories where human presence seems almost insignificant. At times clouds wrap around the summits and the landscape no longer resembles a specific place. It is as if we were looking into the interior of something immense, something that existed long before us and will continue there when we are gone.
I have devoted a good part of my life to travelling through and photographing these places. I have walked among mountains, waited for hours for light that never arrived, and witnessed other light that lasted only a few seconds. Sometimes I returned with the photograph I was looking for. Many other times, with images I could never have imagined.
Over the years I have understood that what moves me most about these landscapes is not only their beauty. It is their ability to make us feel the true scale of the world. Before a mountain, a glacier or the vastness of the desert, our own measures cease to make sense.
This fourth portfolio brings together photographs made across Chile. It does not attempt to show all its landscapes or build a catalogue of its wonders. It is a personal selection of the places that have made me stop, lift my eyes and contemplate.
Because there are moments when the beauty of this land seems to exceed everything we are capable of understanding.
As if Chile were a vast wound through which the Earth had decided to reveal all its beauty.
GVIVANCO
