Bio

Self-portrait based on the photograph by Koen Wissing

Patricio Salinas A (Valparaíso 1949) is a photographer, journalist, and writer. He has studied Sociology, History of Ideas, and Photography. He holds a master’s degree in Photojournalism from Sundsvall University in Sweden. In the 1990s, he was in charge of the F48 Photographic Gallery (belonging to the Swedish Association of Professional Photographers) and was the project manager and curator at the Centrum för Fotografi in Sweden. Salinas’ photographic work is represented at the National Center for Contemporary Art in Cerrillos, Santiago, Chile; at the Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DIRAC), and in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.

Inquiring into history becomes a moral obligation. As an artist, I feel that part of the buried history urges commitment, and the need to act on it to transform its discourse. The metaphor of unearthing memory becomes literal. An artist documents and archives the memories that emerge, and through a process of recording and dissemination, makes them public, turning the intimate and personal into something collective. The camera then acts as a tool for writing time. A historical tool that works in a double sense: the excavation of the material (body) and the excavation of the immaterial (evocations). Ultimately, it is the viewer of the image who ends up constructing the discourse.

Patricio Salinas A