Absence and presence

In this first show in Dublin of Chilean photographer Luis Poirot, the Embassy of Chile in Ireland in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes Dublin, present a selection of 20 images from his project Portraying the Absence. Pablo Neruda. This is a photographic journey through his writing to enable us to rediscover the singular relationship of the author with the world around him.

The exhibition portrays memories of the poet in its different facets in an approach that emerged in 1969, when the photographer met him personally. Subsequently, in 1982, when his widow, Matilde Urrutia, returned to Chile, she proposed to record with his camera the house in Isla Negra. Then all the ghosts of the absence came, the inscriptions in the stockade brought him the certainty that Chile was a country which remembered. He began to receive then, as by chance, magical and exciting stories about Neruda. For two years the photographer repeated his visits to Chile, Matilde Urrutia, the stockade and the witnesses. This is the way the book Neruda, Absence and Presence emerged. A selection of images from this body of work will be displayed at this show.

Luis Poirot (Santiago de Chile, 1940) has been a photographer since 1964. He has worked for the press and publishing houses in Chile, France and Spain (1965-1995). As well as running photography workshops, he has worked for TV, cinema and theatre. Between 2001 and 2005, he was the Cultural Attaché for the Embassy of Chile in Brussels. His photography is part of international public collections such as the ones at Santiago de Chile’s Museum of Fine Arts and the National Library in Chile, the National Museum Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and the IVAM (Spain), as well as being present in some private collections in Chile, USA, Spain, Argentina, England, France and Belgium. He has published about his work extensively.