Cuto Reed studied photography at the Photography School of Instituto Profesional Arcos in Chile. From the very beginning, his work has been closely connected to the intimate aspects of human experience and the documentation of artists linked to performance and music. His first book, Lugar Violento, the project through which he obtained his photography degree, is an authorial exploration of intimacy, violence, and the pain embedded in everyday life. During those early years, he became a photographer for the Chilean stoner rock and melodic punk scene, while also working as assistant to renowned Chilean photographer Gonzalo Donoso, a key figure in music portraiture in Chile throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside him, Reed collaborated on photographic productions as well as editing and post-production processes for the book Retratos Músicos Chilenos: 1986–2012.

In 2015, after several years working as a photographer and videographer for communication agencies — mainly focused on advertising campaigns and corporate internal communications — he decided to leave that institutional path behind in order to pursue a more personal and author-driven practice in Valparaíso, Chile.

There, he created Valparaíso Bizarre, his first portrait photography book directly connected to the queer community: a photobook composed of 16 black-and-white studio portraits, where he began consolidating a distinctive visual language in dialogue with fashion, editorial photography, documentary practices, and queer identities. In 2016, the book was launched at the emblematic Parque Cultural de Valparaíso and later exhibited at Cine Arte Alameda in Santiago, a venue deeply significant to Chile’s queer and cultural scene.

That same year, Reed began shooting Crimen en Casa Pasión, a film inspired both by the visual universe developed through his portraits and by the shared experiences of artists and characters from the queer nightlife scene of those years.

In 2017, Reed received a work opportunity in Canada and decided to migrate due to the economic difficulties of sustaining an artistic practice connected to underground and dissident culture in Chile.

In 2018, he arrived in Montreal, beginning a new chapter as both migrant and artist. There, he completed his short film alongside fellow migrant collaborators and started an extensive photographic practice focused on migrant queer and BIPOC communities, documenting scenes such as Ballroom, DICOÑO, and Pikete, among others. Since then, his work has centered on portraiture and the queer memory of contemporary performance, while currently developing a photographic archive of migrant artists who are part of Montreal’s queer underground. For Reed, this universe deeply echoes the bohemian and port-city identity of Valparaíso: cities shaped by cultural hybridity, dissidence, and the stories of those who arrive searching for new possibilities.