Image Festival Amman
The Instituto Cervantes de Aman cooperates, another year, with the Image Festival Amman, inviting the photographer and graphic journalist (World Press Photo Prize 2012), Samuel Aranda.
Aranda will open his exhibition Lugares lejanos, hogares y raíces (Faraway places, homes, and roots), works related to the theme selected by the Festival this edition, and will give a conference to share with the attendants his experience throughout his professional career as a photographer and a graphic journalist, profession that has taken him to live in countries such as Tunisia or Yemen and has made a kind of nomad out of him.
Samuel Aranda (Santa Coloma de Gramanet, 1979) began working as a photographer when he was 19 years old in the newspapers El País and El Periódico de Catalunya, in Barcelona. When he was 21, he covered the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for Agencia EFE. In 2004, he became part of the France-Presse Agency, where he carried out several articles in Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Morocco, Western Sahara, and China. In 2006, his project about African migrants trying to get to Europe was granted the ANIGTV National Photography Price. That same year, he worked again as an independent photographer on projects about the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, social situations in India, the independence of Kosovo, the conflict in Colombia, the dispute regarding Moldova and Transnistria, the kids in the streets of Bucharest, and the Camorra in Napoli.
In 2011, he covered the Arab revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libia, and Yemen; that project was displayed in the Instituto Cervantes of New York and was selected to be part of the "Top 100 Photos of 2011" of the New York Times. He received the World Press Photo Award in 2012 for a picture on the Yemen conflict and the Ortega y Gasset Prize in 2016 for a project on the migratory crisis in Europe, among other prizes.
He also received a BBVA scholarship to carry out its project "En las Orillas del Rio" (In the Nile’s Shores), to document the Nile River from Alexandria to the border with Sudan. In 2020 he received an allocation from the Vila Casas Foundation to support his project "Territorio" (Territory).
He currently lives in Paris and is a member of the agency Panos in London.