After studying at the Cambridge Institute of Education (1966) and the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago (1972), Paz Errázuriz co-founded the Association of Independent Photographers in 1981, along with several other Chilean photographers. It was not until 1993 that she obtained formal education in photography by enrolling in the International Center for Photography in New York.
Throughout more than three decades of her career, Errázuriz documents the social and historical processes of her environment. During the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, the artist brought to light the different processes of alienation, exclusion and violence that were reproduced in Chilean society. Paz Errázuriz, and her unique ability to construct poetic and intimate narratives on complex and delicate subjects, produced the series Dormidos (Sleeping in the Streets) between 1979 and 1980, in which she documented the lives of homeless people sleeping on the streets of Santiago, in a critique and metaphor of the paralysis of citizens in Chile during the regime of repression. In the important series La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple) (1982–90), Errázuriz brings to light the life of resistance of transsexual people by entering into this marginalized community, subject to various forms of violence for their mere existence. The artist portrays, over the course of eight years, the community care networks through which her subjects survive the conditions of oppression and persecution.
In 1994, another important series, El infarto del alma (The Heart Attack of the Soul), was published. In this series, Errázuriz documents the lives of patients admitted to the Putaendos psychiatric hospital and, ultimately, her critical view of the inhumane conditions of treatment has generated a structural change in patient care.
Her work was included in the collective exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2017). And, recently, it was included in the retrospective solo exhibition Histoires Inachevées by La Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris (2023)
Paz Errázuriz’s work is part of important public and private collections, including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA – New York, United States), Tate Galleries (London, United Kingdom), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Guggenheim Museum (New York, United States), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, Chile), Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, Colombia), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, United States), Colección Daros Latinamerica (Zurich, Switzerland), Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid, Spain), International Center for Photography (ICP – New York, United States), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, United States), Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, United States), California Museum of Photography (Riverside, United States), Anna Gamazo de Abelló Collection (Madrid, Spain), Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski Collection (Paris, France).
In addition, the artist has received important grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1986), Fundación Andes (1990), Fulbright Program (1992) and Fondart (1994, 2009). She has been awarded in Chile with the Ansel Adams Prize of the Chilean-North American Institute of Culture (1995), the Altazor Prize for National Arts (2005) and the Artistic Career Award of the Circle of Art Critics of Chile (2005). In 2014 she received the Pablo Neruda Order of Merit, and in 2015, the PhotoEspaña Prize. Errázuriz represented Chile at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 alongside Lotty Rosenfeld.
Latest exhibitions:
