[O]n the right side I spot a parochial native of Santiago de Chile, a government or bank official, clerk or bureaucrat, a good man who has never left Chile, his little hat says as much, startled as he walks through Hyde Park with a stern look on his face (though his sternness is of the most helpless variety), as if he were thinking abstruse thoughts. On the left side of the picture a girl, possibly a nanny, pushes a baby carriage that isn’t seen: only the handle appears in the frame. This girl is English: her eyes gaze at the carriage that I can’t see and the child who I can’t see, but by the expression on her face it’s clear that she’s elsewhere, a much warmer place, the tropic of geometric forms, the tropic of geometric exiles. The photograph doesn’t end with these two figures, who actually only frame it and thereby give it a twist: between the Luciferian nanny and the parochial Chilean from Santiago, but further in the distance, a couple stroll arm in arm toward the photographer and foreground, which thus becomes a promise of the future, as if the fate of that ideal (and eminently British) couple were the peripatetic Chilean and the baby we can’t see and the baby’s questionable caretaker. But even here the photograph doesn’t end (because this photograph and maybe all photographs have a beginning and an end, though as a general rule we never know for sure what they are), or the staging of the scene doesn’t end: in the background there are three tiny silhouettes, this time in the exact center of the lens, three silhouettes poised at the point where the placid Hyde Park path merges with the horizon, silhouettes that may either be approaching Larrain’s camera or moving away from it, probably approaching, three silhouettes that are like three black holes or like three tiny scratches in the fateful serenity (and clarity) of this photograph.

Roberto Bolaño, describing Sergio Larrain’s photo in Between Parentheses