Wednesday. First of all, you need a camera that you like, the one you like most, because it's about being content with the body, with what you have in your hands, and the instrument is key for anyone who practices a craft, and it should be the minimum, the essential and nothing more. Second, have an enlarger to your liking, the richest and simplest possible (in 35 mm, the smallest one that LEITZ makes is the best, it lasts you your whole life).
The game is to set out on an adventure, like a sailboat, unfurl the sails. Go to Valparaiso, or to Chiloé, through the streets all day, wander and wander through unknown places, and sit down when you're tired under a tree, buy a banana or some bread and then take a train, go to a place that strikes your fancy, and look, draw too, and look. Get out of the known world, enter what you've never seen, LET YOURSELF BE CARRIED by your taste, a lot of going from one place to another, wherever strikes your fancy. Little by little you find things and images come to you, like apparitions you capture them.
Then when you've returned home, you develop, print and start to look at what you've caught, all the fish, and you put them with tape on the wall, you print them on postcard-sized sheets and you look at them. Then you start to play with the L's, to look for crops, to frame, and you learn composition, geometry. They frame perfectly with the L's and you enlarge what you've framed and you leave it on the wall. So you keep looking, to keep seeing. When you're sure a photo is bad, straight to the trash. The best ones you move a bit higher on the wall, finally you keep the good ones and nothing more (keeping the mediocre traps you in the mediocre). Only the top ones you keep, everything else you throw out, because you carry in your psyche everything you retain.
Then you do gymnastics, you entertain yourself with other things and you don't worry anymore. You start to look at the work of other photographers and to seek out what's good in everything you find: books, magazines, etc. and you extract the best, and if you can cut it out, you take what's good and you start pasting it on the wall next to yours, and if you can't cut it out, you open the book or magazines on the pages of the good things and you leave it open on display. Then you leave it for weeks, months, as long as it lasts, you take a long time to see, but little by little the secret reveals itself to you and you start to see what is good and the depth of each thing.
You keep living peacefully, you draw a little, you go out for walks and never force yourself to go out to take photos, because you lose the poetry, the life it has gets sick, it's like forcing love or friendship, you can't. When it's born in you again, you can set out on another trip, another wandering: to Puerto Aguirre, you can ride down the Baker on horseback to the glaciers from Aysén; Valparaiso is always a marvel, it's getting lost in the magic, losing yourself for a few days turning through the hills and streets and sleeping in your sleeping bag somewhere in the night, and very immersed in reality, like swimming underwater, where nothing distracts you, nothing conventional. You let yourself be carried by your sandals slowly, as if you were cured by the pleasure of looking, humming, and whatever appears you photograph it now with more care, you've learned something about composing and cropping, you do it now with the camera, and so it goes on, the cart fills with fish and you return home. You learn focus, aperture, foreground, saturation, speed, etc., you learn to play with the camera and its possibilities, and you gather poetry (yours and others'), take all the good you find, the good of others. Make yourself a collection of optimal things, a little museum in a folder.
Follow what is your taste and nothing more. Don't trust anything more than your taste, you are life and life is what chooses itself. What you don't like, don't look at it, it doesn't serve. You are the only criterion, but see everything from everyone else. You keep learning, when you have a really good photo, you enlarge it, you make a small exhibition or a little book, you send it to be bound and with that you start establishing a floor, by showing it you locate yourself in what they are, according to how you see it in front of others, there you feel it. Making an exhibition is giving something, like giving food, it's good for others to be shown something made with work and taste. It's not about showing yourself off, it does good, it's healthy for everyone and it does you good because it keeps checking you.
Well, with this you have enough to begin. It's a lot of wandering, sitting under a tree anywhere. It's walking alone through the universe. You start to look again, the conventional world puts up a screen for you, you have to get out of it during the photography period.
Sergio Larraín, 1982