For Alfred Aedo, photography did not begin as a career plan. His earliest memories involve his mother appearing on family trips with a 1990s point-and-shoot. Later came exhibitions, books, magazines and a growing habit of looking at photographs wherever he encountered them.
A retrospective of Sergio Larraín stayed with him. A seed had been planted, he says: the pleasure of contemplating photographs.
Making them seriously came later. In 2018, while working as a programmer at the Chiloé Documentary Festival, he decided to document the week. After seeing the results, his then wife Noémie encouraged him to continue. When she later returned to France, her parting words — “Keep taking photographs, please” — stayed with him.
A mediator of the soul
Aedo describes the camera as a mediator between his inner world and the reality around him. He photographs what he feels from the context in which he lives, without wanting to over-design the process beforehand.
“What is outside the frame builds my photography.”
That sentence is central to his way of working. The people he meets, affectionate bonds, love, heartbreak, friendship and the places he inhabits all enter the photograph before the shutter is pressed. He wants to retain a childlike way of looking: discovering, playing, being surprised and staying receptive to ordinary life.
Photographs that keep changing
Some images matter because they hold a narrative together inside a book or fanzine. Others matter because they can carry an exhibition. Aedo is also drawn to images with what he calls “cognitive friction”: photographs with enough layers to reward repeated looking, and whose meaning can shift over time.
The most private photographs can be the hardest to show. Images of family, friends, loves and heartbreaks may carry more weight than work intended for an audience because they reveal something he cannot easily say in words.
His mother remains one of the strongest influences in his life. He recalls her telling him that the first thing is always to be a good person, and only perhaps after that to make a good photograph. He returns to that thought whenever people speak positively about his work.
Chiloé, migration and belonging
Aedo’s first photographic project focused on stray dogs on Chiloé. At the time he was trying to find a new identity and was also afraid of dogs. One encounter changed the project: a stray dog approached while he sat with the camera, and Aedo felt an unexpected identification with it. The series became a way of speaking about himself through metaphor.
Years later, after moving through other places and eventually living in Berlin, the work acquired additional meaning for him. He began reading the figure of the stray dog through his own experience of migration and belonging. That interpretation is part of Aedo’s personal and political understanding of the series rather than a neutral description of migration itself.
Analogue as ritual
Analogue photography gives Aedo something close to magic. When he lived on the island and had no local laboratory, he developed film himself. Each step — exposure, chemistry, waiting and development — felt artisanal and ritualistic.
“Analogue photography understands very well that immediacy is not the most important thing.”
He is now working toward finishing a photographic point of view on Berlin and eventually returning more often to Chiloé with different eyes: not as someone inside the everyday rhythm of the island, but as someone able to look again with distance and gratitude.
He also wants to return to social projects around photography, including the possibility of workshops with migrant teenagers. For Aedo, photography matters not only because of the image produced but because it can create a space for people to speak, share and reflect on the context in which they live.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
