The Photographers' Gallery in London has given the Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz her first retrospective in the United Kingdom — a survey that arrives decades into a career built under dictatorship and largely outside the institutional circuit that now embraces her.

Errázuriz, born in 1944 in Santiago, began photographing in the 1970s, at a moment when Chile's military coup had shuttered most channels of public culture. Working under the curfew years of Augusto Pinochet's regime, she turned her camera toward those the state preferred invisible: circus performers, psychiatric patients, sex workers, the elderly, the poor. Her best-known series, La Manzana de Adán (Adam's Apple), made with the writer Claudia Donoso between 1982 and 1987, documents transgender cabaret workers in Santiago and Talca with a directness that neither sensationalises nor pities its subjects.

"Even late in life, recognition is possible," Errázuriz has said of the London show — a remark that doubles as a quiet indictment of how long that recognition took. Now in her eighties, she has watched younger Latin American photographers enter European institutions far faster than she ever did.

The retrospective traces the arc of that career. Alongside La Manzana de Adán, it gathers series including her portraits of boxers, of families in the Chilean south, and of the mentally ill residents of a psychiatric hospital in Putaendo — images made in conditions where photographing at all carried risk. Under Pinochet, independent photographers often worked collectively and semi-clandestinely; Errázuriz was a member of the AFI (Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes), the group that kept documentary practice alive when mainstream publishing was censored.

Her method has always been slow and reciprocal. She spent years with her subjects before and after photographing them, and the resulting images carry the weight of that familiarity: frontal, unhurried, uninterested in the decisive moment in favour of sustained regard. Critics have placed her alongside other Latin American humanist documentarians of the period, though her work is more austere than most — closer in temperament to portraits made over time than to street photography's quick grabs.

The London retrospective arrives amid a broader institutional correction. European and North American museums have spent the past decade recovering photographers from the global South whose careers the canon compressed, and Errázuriz's case is textbook: a body of work of consistent seriousness, made under political pressure, recognised abroad only in the artist's later years. She has previously shown at the Rencontres d'Arles and in major Latin American institutions, but a full UK survey eluded her until now.

Whether the Photographers' Gallery exhibition will shift her standing in Britain permanently remains to be seen, but the show itself stands as evidence for her own thesis — that recognition, however delayed, remains within reach — and points toward a future in which the institutions that ignored her for decades may finally make room.