James Turrell for Architectural Digest

AD magazine commissioned me to photograph James Turrell at his new Skyspace in José Ignacio. I also had the privilege of spending a little while with him.

When I photograph someone famous I usually get only a few minutes and we barely exchange a word. That’s how it was supposed to go with James: I allegedly had three minutes to photograph him outside before we went in to calibrate the lighting system. But it occurred to me to ask him to step out with me for some portraits, and we ended up alone in front of his work. I said something about his beard, and he told me he had only shaved once in his life — and that his daughter, who was 2 at the time, didn’t recognise him and burst into tears. He has worn it ever since.

We couldn’t talk much longer. He was eager to get to work on the calibration. I followed him, curious and without expectations. I sat with fifteen other people on the circular marble bench that surrounds the structure and settled in to watch the sky through an opening in the ceiling. For an hour (which felt like five minutes) we looked up in friendly silence. The lights projected onto the white structure created the illusion that it was the sky changing colour. Green, violet, and other colours we would never see outside that dome. The artwork was light itself — the experience of seeing. James invited us to appreciate how light can challenge our perception, how we can see the sky in a completely different way if we change the conditions that surround it. In his words: “We live in this reality we create, and we are quite unconscious of how we create reality. The work is a koan about how we form this world we live in, in particular with the act of looking.”

Read the article (in Spanish) here