Álvaro Ybarra Zavala

Álvaro Ybarra Zavala (born 2 June 1979, Bilbao, Spain) is considered one of the most relevant contemporary photographers and visual artists of his generation. For over two decades, his work has explored memory, identity, and the human impact of conflict, political power, and social transformation. With projects developed across all regions of the world, his practice moves between long-form documentary and a deeply introspective, personal artistic approach.

His work has been published in the world's most prestigious magazines and is part of important private art collections. Internationally awarded and widely exhibited, Ybarra Zavala uses photography as a tool to question legacy, history, and the fragile relationship between humanity and its environment.

His language is classical — black and white, patient, close — and deliberately authorial: each project is conceived as a book, an exhibition and a testimony rather than as a sequence of pictures. Beyond reportage, his conceptual and intimate work has become the core of his practice as an artist: images made over long periods, closer to visual poem than to news, in which violence and tenderness, the epic and the private, are inseparable. It is this more introspective body of work that has entered museums, galleries and collections in Europe and the Americas.

“Photography is my way of stirring emotion, of seeing ourselves in one another, and of defying oblivion: preserving what makes us human.”

Ybarra Zavala works by returning. He goes back to the same territories, the same communities and the same questions for years, often for decades. He researches before photographing, stays long enough to belong to the story, and lets each project take the time it needs. What he looks for is not an event, but the human condition behind it.

He works with editorial and institutional media, and takes on assignments that fit inside the long-term projects he is already building, so commissioned and personal work feed one another. His photographs are published and exhibited as coherent bodies of work — Apocalypse, Macondo, The Voices of Darfur, Donbass, 1984 – Venezuela — never as isolated images.

Alongside this runs a slower, more intimate body of work: series built as visual poems about silence, faith, family, ritual and landscape. Printed as author's editions, these are the works that enter art collections, and the ones he considers the truest expression of his authorship.

• Second prize, Picture Story of the Year, and third prize, General News Picture of the Year, at The PGB Photo Award, Stockholm (2009)
• Olivier Rebbot Award, Overseas Press Club of America (2009)
• Pictures of the Year International award (2011)
• Apocalipsis, finalist for Best Photography Book, 68th Pictures of the Year International
• Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography (2011)
• Alexia Foundation Professional Grant (2016)
• Finalist, Premio Gabriel García Márquez de Periodismo, Image category (2015), for Donbass — selected from 287 entries, the jury placing the essay within “a great tradition of the documentation of armed conflict in Europe”
• Canon Global Brand Ambassador (2017)
• Leica Ambassador (2021)
• Special Prize Ukraine, Hendrik teNeues Photography Award (2022), for his work on the front lines of eastern Ukraine

Beyond numerous evening screenings on the Campo Santo screen, Ybarra Zavala has exhibited at Visa pour l'Image in four separate editions of the festival, making him one of the photographers most often exhibited in its history. The festival has also recognised his work through Visa d'Or nominations, selecting his photography for an official festival catalogue cover and, in 2019, for the official poster of its 31st edition.

Among those editions: his exhibition on the global food industry (26th edition, 2014) and the solo show of 1984 – Venezuela at the Couvent des Minimes in 2019.

He was selected as one of twelve photographers worldwide for the 17th Joop Swart Masterclass (2010), with the resulting work published in the collective book Persistence, and later joined the foundation as an international nominator for the 6x6 Global Talent Program. He holds an author profile at World Press Photo.

• WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012–2013), including an untitled 2003 image from Apocalypse
• Macondo, Sala de exposiciones del Ayuntamiento de Logroño (October 2016), 28 photographs shown within the Jornadas Futuro en Español
• Macondo: Memories of the Colombian Conflict, The Gallatin Galleries, New York University, curated by Lauren Walsh (December 2016 – January 2017), with an opening panel hosted by the Overseas Press Club of America alongside Alice Gabriner and Marie Cruz Soto
• Macondo: memorias del conflicto colombiano, EFTI, Madrid (June 2017), presented alongside the book Macondo
• Macondo, Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación, Bogotá (May–June 2017), 35 photographs in the main hall
• Revolución, EFTI, Madrid (July 2021), his work on Cuba's LGBTI community, and at the Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes, Valladolid, within the I Congreso de Periodismo Miguel Delibes (October 2021)
• Bolivariano, Real Casa de Correos, Puerta del Sol, Madrid (October 2024), a street exhibition of 31 black-and-white photographs on fifteen years of Venezuela, in the very centre of the city
• Darfur: Images Against Impunity, with Lynsey Addario and Stanley Greene, produced and curated by Monica Allende (80 images)
• Royal Albert Hall, London
• United Nations, New York and Geneva

His work is registered with SAIF (Société des Auteurs des Arts visuels et de l'Image Fixe), the French collective-rights society for visual authors, which has featured his photographs in its public campaigns defending authorship rights online, credited as “Frontière Colombie – Venezuela, 2019. © Álvaro Ybarra Zavala” — within the same institutional framework that honours authors such as William Klein, a founding member of SAIF's comité de parrainage since 1999. He holds an author profile at World Press Photo and has worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

• DANA — When the Water RoseEditorial
• BolivarianoPersonal Projects
• Colombian Civil WarPersonal Projects
• Iraq WarEditorial
• SilenceFine Art

The complete record of publications, exhibitions, awards and screenings is gathered in the news archive.

TIME, The New Yorker, Stern, Paris Match, Newsweek, Le Monde, Vanity Fair, ABC and XLSemanal, among others, in a continuous editorial record spanning more than twenty years.