His angles stay low, sometimes seeming to emerge from the ground, which is especially apposite in his early pictures of Santiago street kids, but the low angles come to define him as a photographer of all-seeing alertness and irreproachable modesty. You may see resemblances to the early work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (who invited Larrain to join Magnum) as well as to his contemporary Robert Frank, but he had his own sinuous style: doing more with less, inviting chance and mess, savoring rough textures. But for the decade or so that he was in the world and regularly taking pictures, his work, as amply illustrated in SERGIO LARRAIN (Aperture, $85), edited by Agnès Sire, was a constant source of wonder. It was only after studying forestry at Berkeley that he began seriously taking pictures in the mid-1950s, and then an encounter with the Bolivian mystic Oscar Ichazo in 1968 caused him to retreat for the remainder of his life into meditation and yoga, taking small, quiet photos only occasionally, as complements to his inner quest. Consider, for example, the work of the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain (1931-2012), whose career was both extraordinary and unusually abbreviated. And yet major surprises continue to arrive, dispatches from the past.

Sometimes the world of photography books can seem not unlike that of popular music on disc, with endless repackaging of the classics - each new volume containing pictures that haven’t been previously reprinted, so that if you are a devotee or a completist you will have to shell out for another tome.

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