SAMUEL ARANDA
“Without roots it is impossible to have a cosmopolitan view of the world.”
Daniel Vázquez Sallés
— Territory
2nd Floor: Galleries 1-7
A few years ago, the New York Times requested Samuel Aranda to document the socio-political situation in Catalonia as related to the public referendum of 1 October 2017. This commission brought him back to a “territory” he was close to, after almost twenty years travelling and photographing events around the world.
The exhibition Territori [Territory] is the consequence of this coming home, his return to a setting that called on him to reflect upon his most immediate environment. The resultant personal project emerged in this way, as he enjoyed full creative freedom, with no restrictions placed on his task. Samuel Aranda put aside his own travelling disposition for a while to go back to his roots.
The exhibit refers to three sites, each a place where the artist revived emotional traces and connections: Santa Coloma de Gramenet, where his family lives as well as his childhood friends; the Empordà region, where he goes to get away, surrounded by nature and books; and Barcelona, the city where he set out on his own from a young age, and where by pure chance he came across the photographic camera.
Samuel Aranda was born in Santa Coloma de Gramenet on 23 May 1979; his parents, originally from Andalusia, had immigrated there in 1975. At the age of fourteen his self-taught creative path began as he painted graffiti in public places. At seventeen he left home to live in on his own in the Raval neighbourhood, where his spirit of survival was essential when it came to taking on uncertain, even convulsive days.
In this context, he discovered by pure chance a Nikon F60 and came upon two books he still owns: one by the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and the other by the photographer William Klein, dedicated to New York. The Nikon became his inseparable companion as he immortalised the graffiti he painted on walls and trains, in spite of the risk this involved—he and his friends soon learnt how to flee through narrow streets and alleys to avoid being detained.
His first job was with the company Gas Natural: he would go from home to home as a metre reader, offering to take on neighbourhoods that were stigmatised and had become controversial, like Can Tunis and the Raval. This experience brought him closer to difficult realities that were nonetheless invisible. Thanks to his instinctive capacity for survival—the term that best defines him, as he sees it—he was able to surmount the most challenging situations, taking his camera most naturally wherever he went.
All told, together with what can be intuited as an innate sense of justice, his interest grew in denouncing certain situations he was witness to. One of his first accomplishments was the publication of images of minors in a bordello near where he lived, in the Raval, which led to the place being raided and the young women freed. This is one of the many “little things”, as he himself terms them, that the impact of his photographs can accomplish, living transformations in favour of the evolution of contemporary society.
When Aranda lived in Barcelona he had an experience that led him to leave the country. One day he was arrested in Manresa along with a few friends as they painted graffiti on trains, and was detained for three days. As he awaited trial (which took six years) he chose to leave that particular creative facet aside and focus on documenting the world around him. That was the beginning of his future career path.
These events contrasted with an alluring proposal he received from the French government, by way of a grant to do graffiti in Montpellier. The invitation to leave Catalonia afforded him the opportunity to get to know other countries and enjoy new professional avenues. His occasional visits to France ended with a trip around Europe on Interrail, and this adventure opened his mind to a world full of stories and situations just waiting for his perceptive gaze.
Since then he has not stopped travelling to document profoundly relevant events. In 2002 he left France for Jerusalem, where he experienced the political reality of the country first-hand, hearing the sound of gunshots and seeing cadavers in the street. From there he went to Gaza in 2004, where the spiritual leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated just in front of his home.
The photographs Samuel Aranda made of his surroundings raised his professional profile and led to new projects, featuring reports on the Canary Islands, the migratory route through the Sahel, Morocco, the Iraq war, Lebanon, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Tunisia, China, Transnistria and Yemen, amongst others. These are just some of the locations where Aranda’s nomadic spirit (as he recognises it) has captured images that speak for themselves, revealing realities that are unknown to most of society.
He has worked for a long list of media outlets: El País, Le Monde, The Sunday Times Magazine and National Geographic, as well as the agencies Efe and France Press, to cite just a few; now he works exclusively for The New York Times.
The sensibility and strength we can draw from Aranda’s images, the fruit of his valiant, adventurous attitude, have been widely acknowledged: in spite of his young age he has won prestigious awards such as the World Press Photo (2012) and the Ortega y Gasset (2016). Above all, he has enjoyed the recognition of his home town, where in 2012 he was awarded the Prize of the City of Santa Coloma de Gramenet.