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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Interview by Henry Yates

A bodybuilder pinches his bulging thigh – Sergio Purtell’s best photograph

‘The skin has a luminous quality that makes it seem very real’ … from Sergio Purtell’s book Moral Minority.
‘The skin has a luminous quality that makes it seem very real’ … from Sergio Purtell’s book Moral Minority. Photograph: Sergio Purtell

I’d been studying architectural design in Chile and thought I would do the same when I got to the US. But at university there, photography was one of my subjects – and the minute I put that first sheet of paper in the developer, it was magic to me. There is so much you can say in just one frame. I found it thrilling and overwhelming.

I’ve been living in the US for more than 50 years now and a lot of the pictures from my new book, Moral Minority, were made in the 1980s, when my notion of being a photographer was just beginning to form. The country was new to me and I wanted to figure out how to fit into it and how things worked.

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