SANTI PALACIOS
Santi Palacios (Madrid, 1985). Photojournalist, Canon Ambassador and Editor in Chief of Sonda Internacional, a non-profit media outlet specializing in visual journalism on the climate crisis. Since the beginning of his career Santi has focused on migrations and human ecology—these interests stemming from his training as a sociologist. His work has been published in major magazines and newspapers worldwide, exhibited in dozens of cities, and it has received a number of national and international awards including a World Press Photo, the Ortega y Gasset Award or the Spain’s National Photojournalism Award two years running. In 2016 he was part of the team nominated by the Associated Press for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography; and in 2018 he was selected by the World Press Photo 6x6 Talent Program in Europe. In 2023 he was a member of the jury of the World Press Photo contest. Santi often contributes to the magazine Revista 5W, the NGO, Open Arms, and is a guest lecturer at the EFTI International Photography School, among others. He was a frequent contributor to the Associated Press from 2014 to 2018, and he has also freelanced occasionally with other media in the past, including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, CNN and El País.
- CAREER -
The early days
Santi Palacios studied Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid, with a special interest in the study of human ecology, international relations, political geography and the sociology of migration. Fascinated by visual sociology and photojournalism, he combined his university career with photography studies at EFTI —the Madrid International Centre of Photography and Cinema— and began to work as a freelance photographer at the end of 2004. In 2007 he started working on QUIDAM, his first long-term photographic project. That same year he decided to forego a scholarship from the Political Economy department of his faculty and moved to the Netherlands, where he completed the final year of his Bachelor’s degree at the Vrije University of Amsterdam on an Erasmus scholarship. He then ruled out pursuing a doctorate and developing an academic career, to focus on fieldwork, without yet knowing whether it would be in the field of development cooperation or journalism.
After completing his degree in 2008 and taking a course on Analysis, programming and management of humanitarian and emergency aid at the Complutense Foundation in Madrid, he moved to Barcelona, where he specialised in Photojournalism at the GrisArt School of Photography. He completed his first long-distance assignment at the beginning of 2009, accompanying a freight transport driver, on his route through European roads, to document the impact of the economic crisis on the sector. That same year, he completed an audiovisual project in Belén de los Andaquíes (Caquetá, Colombia) with the NGOs: Tomando Conciencia and Escuela Audiovisual Infantil; moreover, back in Barcelona, he co-founded the independent production company, Buho Producers, in order to develop his career without having to depend on an industry in constant crisis.
In 2011, after several months in Asia and after completing a Masters in International Journalism at the EFE International News Agency in Madrid, he moved to Bolivia to work under a grant at the EFE branch office in La Paz. His first reports there documented the contamination of Lake Titicaca and the population displacements due to environmental causes: moreover, life in the women's prisons of the Bolivian capital. The latter theme was taken up again two years later with a report on Obrajes, a women's prison in La Paz, which won the REVELA award. During his stay in Bolivia he founded together with his fellow photojournalists the first photojournalism festival of La Paz: A 3600 mm.
Borders and migrations
Upon his return to Madrid in 2012, he completed several projects with Buho Producers before dissolving the production company with the intention, already in 2013, of dedicating his career entirely to international journalism. It was then that he began one of his most important projects: On the Edge, focused on documenting the moments in which thousands of people cross a border—or prepare for it or die in the attempt. Many of his best-known and most award-winning images are part of this project, a project he has been developing since then in different corners of the world.
On the Edge began on the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla in 2013, continuing into 2014, with coverage in Melilla that lasted ten months. There, he began to work regularly with the international news agency: Associated Press—also completing assignments for The New York Times and El País. His documentary work in Melilla was published in newspapers and magazines around the world and earned him awards such as the Pictures of the Year International and Spain’s National Photojournalism Award in 2015.
He moved to Greece in the summer of 2015, where he completed another 10-month coverage on the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan migration route for the Associated Press. This work generated much impact in the international press, getting coverage in leading newspapers and magazines around the world and receiving numerous awards and citations: such as The Overseas Press Club of America; The Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar; the Istanbul Photo Awards; THE FENCE; the ‘Reporteros’ award from the newspaper, El Mundo; the United States National Press Photographers Association; the Sigma Delta Chi Awards; and, for the second consecutive year, Spain’s National Photojournalism Award: granted by the National Association of Graphic Press. This coverage also resulted in him being included in the Associated Press-nominated team for the Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News Photography category. That same year, he also began collaborating with the newly-founded Spanish NGO, Open Arms, which specialises in maritime rescue operations. The story behind the creation of the NGO and those months in Lesbos inspired the film Mediterráneo (2021), with actor Àlex Monner, in the role of Santi Palacios.
A year later, in 2016, he began documenting migrant rescue operations in international waters in the Central Mediterranean. With a picture of one of those operations off the Libyan coast, aboard an Open Arms ship, he won a World Press Photo award in 2017. To date, he has documented a dozen Open Arms rescue missions in the Central Mediterranean; these images have been widely distributed globally and have received awards such as the Enrique Meneses Award and several Pictures of the Year Iberoamerica in different categories. Some went viral on social media and rekindled the political and social debate on migration—such as pictures of a rescue operation in 2017, of a boat with 168 survivors and 13 bodies.
During that stage of his career, he also covered other topics more distant from the migration issue. He travelled twice to Ukraine to cover the Maidan uprising in Kiev in 2014 and the war in Donetsk in 2015; he made brief trips to Erbil and Mosul (Iraq) and Lebanon in 2017 and travelled to the Philippines that same year to report on the so-called war on drugs, waged by President Rodrigo Duterte. Not long after that, on his return to Barcelona, he covered the days after the terrorist attack of 17 August in Las Ramblas for the Associated Press and later, the Catalan referendum on independence and the ensuing protests.
He also travelled to Tijuana between 2018 and 2019 to document the situation at the border wall, which separates Mexico from the United States—later travelling to Mayotte, in the Mozambique Strait, to report on migrants crossing the sea to the small French island from Madagascar and Comoros.
Human ecology
In 2018, he decided to take a step back from his fieldwork on borders and migration, for a few months, to gain perspective. That is when he edited the short documentary, Coming Ashore, in Barcelona, with material produced together with videojournalist Mikel Konate, on the Greek island of Lesbos in 2015. He also undertook, together with colleagues Mikel Konate, Simón Casal and Maribel Izcue, the production of the documentary: The Gourougou Trial, which addresses the issue of ‘hot returns’ on the Spain-Morocco border. Within the framework of this project, he looked further into the European outsourcing and border shielding policy, through a series of interviews in Berlin with lawyers and experts from the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).
That same year, he was selected as one of the six talents in Europe by the 6x6 Global Talent Program of the World Press Photo Foundation. Meanwhile, he resumed his other major line of work: human ecology and the evolution of the climate crisis. He travelled to Sri Lanka, Thailand and India—returning to the latter in 2019 to report on life in the wettest place on earth, in the northeastern state of Meghalaya. That year he received a Leonardo grant for researchers and cultural creators to carry out a photography project on life under conditions of extreme pollution in large Asian cities. This would take him back to India to document environmental pollution in Delhi, and to Jakarta (Indonesia) in early 2020 to capture, through images, the impact of water pollution.
In May 2021, Santi co-founded Sonda Internacional a non-profile media outlet specialized in in-depth visual journalism on the climate crisis.
Pandemic
Following his return to Barcelona from Indonesia, in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in Europe. From the city, he covered the worst months of the State of Alarm, focusing on nursing homes, which he was able to access during the toughest lockdown period, thanks to Open Arms. The result of his work in nursing homes, Soledades Mayores, was published in Revista 5W and obtained the Luis Valtueña, International Humanitarian Photography Award, granted by Doctors of the World. It was also exhibited, alongside his work on the central Mediterranean, in the exhibition Infinite Identities, Photography in the age of Sharing, at the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam. During the lockdown, he promoted the ARCHIVO COVID project, a photo journal on the Covid-19 crisis that includes images by 385 professional photojournalists and videojournalists.
The management of ARCHIVO COVID was extended to 2021. In the spring of that same year, he also held the position of Photo Editor of Revista 5W, a magazine with which he has worked regularly since its creation in 2015. Meanwhile, the easing of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic enabled him to resume his work outside Spain. In the first half of the year, he accompanied the Open Arms Astral ship on a new rescue mission in the Central Mediterranean; he also documented the shipment of humanitarian aid to India, coordinated by Open Arms, to alleviate the crisis caused by Covid-19, as well as the shipment of food aid to Mozambique, to assist in the crisis caused by the armed conflict in the Cabo Delgado province. This same year, his work On the Edge, on borders and migrations, was selected as a finalist in the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
Ukraine
After covering the conflict in Ukraine: first in the Maidan uprising in Kiev in early 2014 and in Donbas in early 2015, Santi returned at the beginning of the large-scale invasion launched by Russia on February 24. 2022. He was one of the first journalists to enter the city of Bucha after the withdrawal of Russian troops, working in the days and weeks that followed to document the consequences of the massacre perpetrated by the occupation army. His work had a great international impact and was recognized with various awards, including the prestigious Ortega y Gasset award in 2023.
Sonda Internacional
Santi has been the editor-in-chief of Sonda Internacional since May 2021: a non-profit outlet specializing in in-depth visual journalism on the climate crisis, that he co-founded with a group of colleagues. The website was launched on May 4, 2022 and since then they have published long-form visual journalism projects developed in Indonesia, Philippines, India, Spain and Portugal.
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In addition to his work as a photojournalist, which has been exhibited in dozens of cities, Santi Palacios has given numerous lectures on his experience in the field at universities, festivals and events including the TEDx talks in Patras, Greece. He also works teaching master classes in centres such as EFTI - the Madrid International Centre of Photography and Cinema - since 2016, and for the Masters of International Journalism at Blanquerna, the University Ramón Llull, Barcelona, since 2017.
*Last update: January 2024