Margarita Dittborn

At 13 years old Margarita Dittborn was given a camera and hasn’t stopped taking pictures since. She swears she’s always wanted to be a photographer and this drive can be seen in her numerous international exhibits and last year’s Círculo de Críticos de Chile (Chile Critics Circle) award for her exhibition Enfermas de Amor. 

An emerging young photographer, she has won several awards including the “Best Chilean Photography Exhibition Prize 2008” at the Art Critics Circle Awards for her “Lovesick Woman” series. Her work draws inspiration from her own life experiences, such as her obsession with food and animals, as well as from Baroque paintings she has seen at the Fine Arts Museum in Santiago, Chile. She incorporates poetic elements from such references as well as the concept of lighting to create photomontages of quirky and sometimes eccentric interpretations of various objects, past history and Baroque paintings. 

In her universe, food plays a central part: still life banquets, rabbits chasing carrots, delicious golden fruit emerging from the darkness. With detail-oriented and eager-to-please work habits, it’s easy to see how Margarita naturally identifies with a chef. She combines this persona with her skills as a modern photographer, capturing not only single moments with her camera, but also composing photomontages that bring everything together. 

Margarita Dittborn has been featured in a directory of the top 500 young artists in the world, “Younger than Jesus”, published by the New Museum in New York, USA and Phaidon in 2009, in conjunction with the museum’s new signature triennial and the first major international exhibition by the same title, that is devoted exclusively to the generation born around 1980, who were under the age of thirty-three years old at the time of the exhibition.