One with the image: from his stirring work as a photojournalist to his recent digital exploration, Marcelo Montecino reveals a vision that integrates emotion, technology, and imagination.

• Author: Orellana, Renato

1943: Marcelo Tomas Montecino--Slaughter on his mother's side-is born in Santiago, Chile. 1951: While playing war, a small steel pellet fired by a friend lodges in his left eye rendering him partially, but irrevocably, blind. Whether this accident serves to enhance to his appreciation of "the image," he may not even know himself. 1954: He is given his first camera as a birthday present. Now complete, he becomes a photographer from that moment on: a neo-cyclops running about, in the city capturing spaces large and small and peering into his own life. His game with light is rooted in the traditional optical symbiosis between man and technology: the magnifying glass, the telescope, the microscope, photography: he becomes a luminescently bionic youth. Montecino fulfills the wishes of the Blade Runner androids born as adult offspring of test-tube pregnancies, who attempt to attain their missing childhoods by memorizing the lives of others. He constructs his biography with each click of the shutter. His youthful romanticism is poured onto Santiago in works like El beso [The Kiss] or La calle San Pablo, [Saint Paul Street] and in the nudes of female friends and lovers, and of his wife, Lucy.

His camera has kept him on the streets of his two cities, Washington, D.C., and Santiago, where he has lived on and off since he was a child, and for which he has paid the price of feeling out of place in both. 1973: The War. His brother Christian is murdered during the first weeks of the military coup in Chile. Biography grows into history. He is a correspondent for the Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Chilean civil wars and, like many others, he quietly documents the abuses. He also travels with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on several of its missions. In spite of his seething rage, his vision remains gentle and his photographs of women enduring brutality reconstitute memories for anyone who has ever seen them. During the years of Somoza's fall and the rise of Pinochet, he lives intensely the photojournalistic ethics and aesthetics he shares with many affiliates of the Association of Freelance Photographers (AFI): Paz Errazuriz, Helen Hughes, Leonora Vicuna, Luis Navarro, and the brothers Alvaro and Alejandro Hoppe. These are times of collective creatively, of meetings to share work with each other, to express opinions about it, and to search relentlessly for ways to make their photographs accessible to the public. The lack of funds and space...