/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/VVSSPDPOMZBR5PRFFXV7LLVB3U.jpg)
Photography was not part of the professional plans of Eduardo Soteras Jalil (Córdoba, Argentina, 48 years old).
He studied Economic Sciences and worked as a public accountant.
“Very funny,” he jokes.
During a trip through Europe, specifically in Prague, he learned about the work of the “refugee photographer”, Josef Koudelka.
He was 23 years old and understood that he no longer wanted to dedicate himself to audits and taxes.
At his next stop, in Belgium, he acquired his first camera, a Nikon FG20 film camera.
He had no idea how it worked, just some brief instructions that the seller had given him, and he began to study on his own.
Three more years passed before he completely let go of his stable past and went backpacking to Central America.
Thus began a nomadic life that has taken him from Switzerland to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
From Barcelona to Ethiopia.
To Israel and Palestine.
To “document the interstices of life.”
His coverage of the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region for Agence France-Presse (AFP) has earned him international recognition.
“We were lucky to be the only medium they allowed access to,” he downplays.
Photojournalism is not his thing, he confesses at the headquarters of the International Center of Photography and Film in Madrid, where part of his work in Ethiopia, a finalist for the Luis Valtueña Prize for Humanitarian Photography awarded by Doctors of the World, is on display until March 27.
Half a year ago he left his job at AFP and moved with his wife and two children to Nairobi, where he combines commissioned work with the projects he likes.
“For which no one would pay.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Premio Luis Valtueña (@premioluisvaltuena)
Ask.
What is special about your photography?
Answer.
I am interested in documenting certain interstices of life, how some people develop their lives around an idea or a practice.
I managed to sell a report on the shooting culture in Switzerland, which allowed me to trust my agenda and the strange things I like.
Q.
You have Lebanese roots and your third language is Hebrew, how did your relationship with the Middle East begin?
A.
I lived for almost a year and a half in a cave south of Hebron, documenting the life of semi-nomadic shepherds.
There I started working in Gaza.
I was covering the war in a documentary way, although on the edge of journalism.
And I met my wife, Alejandra.
When I left the agency in August [2023] I was trying to return to Gaza to finish a book.
When this broke out.
Q.
When was the last time?
A.
November 2015. I lived in Congo and they offered me to teach in Ramallah for a week.
In 2014 I covered the war.
I had a press permit, I could enter and the war began.
I tried to continue with my life in Israel, but the bombs could be heard from my town.
And I entered Gaza and I felt at peace because I was where I needed to be.
PHOTO GALLERY
The images of the Luis Valtueña 2023 Award
Q.
What photographs did you take then?
A.
In the middle of all that shit that is war, in that abyss that you feel when you start
to smell death, there was a series of photos that I felt absurdly drawn to take without a rational explanation: the decoration of a party room, a guy with a red balloon on his face that said I
love you
, a collection of local perfumes with militaristic slogans, of the drugs my friends had become addicted to, like tramadol.
Small details.
I called it a kind of preventive archaeology.
And I was not wrong.
I knew it was going to disappear and it disappeared.
Q.
What do you think of the conflict in Gaza today?
A.
[Silence] I don't know what to say.
It's awful.
She has disappeared.
They have erased a place.
It was an open-air prison, as you like;
but a prison in which people found the interstices to generate life.
Like the fern that grows on a wall, that was Gaza.
And they have knocked down the wall.
There was nothing left.
Know?
I didn't write to any of my friends there to ask how they are.
I'm ashamed.
Like the fern that grows on a wall.
That was Gaza.
And they knocked down the wall, there was nothing left
Q.
Why?
R.
What do I tell you?
How are you?
You need something?
It doesn't seem ethical to me.
Q.
How did you end up in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
A.
I had wanted to get rid of the East for a long time.
I always had a very masochistic relationship with Israel;
I was never treated so badly in my life like that place.
Alejandra was leaving, they offered her a job in Congo and I wrote to a friend at AFP.
I moved and started working for the agency covering news.
It was interesting.
Q.
In the end, you fell into photojournalism.
A.
In Kinshasa I became a professional in a bad way.
Living in Congo is very complicated and broke my relationship with photography.
In Gaza he taught classes on weekends in Ramallah.
I'm Arab [points to face], no one saw me as a tourist.
But in Congo I am white.
They kidnapped me twice and there came a point where I said enough was enough.
If they didn't pay me, I didn't go to work.
I don't see it as bad: I started a family, I have two children, I pay for school, bills... Before I led a more
hippy
life , I lived in a cave, I was freer.
And now I'm trying to strike a balance between working for money and getting back into some big projects that you usually don't get paid for.
People have different degrees of importance, even within those that do not matter, there are some that are still lower.
What does an Ethiopian matter?
Q.
In Ethiopia you also covered the war, that of Tigray [November 2020-November 2022].
A.
We were in Paris and my wife was offered to go to Ethiopia.
And I called AFP again.
She told me: I'm a photographer, this is my job, I have to be here.
Ethiopia was not my place, but it was important.
At that moment, he was the hope of the world and everything went to hell.
I was working for an agency and we were the only media outlet that was allowed to enter.
P.
Told like this, it seems easy.
A.
What I saw is 20% of the atrocities that happened.
And from what I witnessed, I was able to raise the camera 5% of the time.
It was very difficult.
Access was always a lottery.
There were times when they gave us access to the front, we arrived, with all the risk that entailed, and suddenly one of the militias got crazy.
and he said we had to go.
Soteras, on February 22 at EFTI.
Moeh Atitar
Q.
What photo that you couldn't take do you have engraved in your memory?
A.
Two days after the beginning of the conflict, we went to the front without having an idea of what was happening.
We advanced as best we could towards the north, towards Tigray, and we found the people who were coming, the wounded and the dead.
It was astonishing.
It was happening: the war had begun.
And it was not safe to work: we knew that if we got off, they would lynch us.
In the hospitals we saw injured people and the Government did not want us to show it.
I took a lot of photos with the phone pretending I was talking.
I would not like to become a surgeon, so that my pulse does not tremble and death does not affect me.
Q.
Your photos of Ethiopia are very aesthetic.
Is there beauty in horror?
A.
Of course, there is something very attractive in tragedy.
Therefore, when there is an accident on the highway, traffic jams form.
Because we need to see what happened.
In Gaza I saw worse things, but I decided not to photograph bodies because I could afford it.
Not in Ethiopia because I knew I was going to be the only one to do them.
Q.
How do you avoid falling into morbidity?
A.
I need to
trick
people, make something that is terrible beautiful for them to see;
It is not to display talent, but to be talked about.
That's the artifice we [journalists] do, giving it a certain coup de grace, so that people stop at this and not at the news about Shakira.
But I am extremely careful, I do not transform any scene, I never ask a victim to modify what she was doing.
They are direct shots.
A young woman carries firewood in the northern region of Ethiopia, mired in a bloody conflict.
The image is part of the finalist series for the Luis Valtueña Prize for Humanitarian Photography by Médicos del Mundo.Eduardo Soteras
Q.
Do conflicts and other evils like hunger in Africa matter less?
A.
There are wars that are more ours, as whites, Europeans, Westerners.
We identify more with Ukraine.
What is happening in Ethiopia has no name, there are killings everywhere [the conflict in Tigray has ended, there are clashes in neighboring Amhara].
There is a photo of a girl carrying firewood.
She was an internally displaced person from the Afar region, which was already in total shit in times of peace and prosperity.
No help was coming to these people;
They had no water and were eating leaves from the few trees there were.
They are nobody and nobody cares about them.
People have different degrees of importance: even within these that do not matter, there are some that are still lower.
What does an Ethiopian matter?
A European is first, then an Israeli, a Palestinian and, lastly, an Amhara.
Q.
With the photo of two children reading in a demolished school, included in the finalist series, you also won the Unicef Photo of the Year 2022 Award. What is your story?
A.
The Government let us go to this area on the border with Tigray.
We did a couple of interviews and they told us that the Government had been executing young people because they thought they had collaborated with the tigresses.
I thought we had reached that point, but they let us continue and we parked the car in front of a school that had been occupied by soldiers.
We enter and discover the beauty of destruction.
In the library everything was lying on the floor, full of water, damp.
I took a photo, but something was missing.
I stayed waiting because the light was very beautiful and these children came in to play.
I went back, to be as less visible as possible, and took that photo.
Children look at books in the library of a primary school that was damaged during fighting that broke out in Ethiopia's Tigray region, in the village of Bisober, on December 9, 2020. The image is part of the Luis Prize finalist series Valtueña of Humanitarian Photography by Doctors of the World.
EDUARDO SOTERAS
Q.
Do the people you portray in conflict become your ghosts?
A.
I think a lot about the people I photographed in Gaza.
But what worries me is that I will become a ghost in life, that things won't affect me.
It's the worst thing that can happen to you.
I wouldn't like to become a surgeon, so that my pulse doesn't tremble and death doesn't affect me.
I would not like to stop feeling afraid of going places and panic of staying without doing anything.
Q.
How are you affected?
A.
I am Argentine, we do psychoanalysis for national sports.
Greetings to my therapist.
The exhibition of the Luis Valtueña Prize for Humanitarian Photography will be open until March 27 at the headquarters of the International Center of Photography and Film (EFTI) in Madrid.
You can follow
Planeta Futuro
on
X
,
,
and
TikTok
and subscribe
to our newsletter
here
.