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Work grant edition 2015

Olmo Calvo

Idomeni, border closed


Presentation

On 9 March 2016, the border between Greece and Macedonia was officially closed for refugees. That caused about 14 000 people to pile up in the small town of Idomeni.

For more than two months the refugees had to survive in an improvised camp, unconditionally, sleeping in tents on the mud and eating thanks to the NGOs, until on May 24 when the Greek government began eviction of the place.


Biography

Olmo Calvo born in Santander (Cantabria, Spain) in 1982, he is currently based in Madrid.

In 2004 he was one of the founding members of the newspaper Diagonal, taking charge of coordinating photography. In 2005 he was one of the founding members of the photographers cooperative SUB in Buenos Aires (Argentina). With the SUB cooperative he won different international awards such as the 2009 Cuenca Art Biennial (Ecuador) or several awards at the 2010 and 2012 Pictures of the Year Latam. In 2012 he was awarded the first prize at the XVI International Luis Valtueña Photography Awards with a series about evictions in Madrid.

In recent years he has been documenting the crisis in Spain, doing reports such as “Fronteras Invisibles”, “Víctimas de los Desahucios”, “No Job Land” or “Los Que Se Quedan”. In 2013 he took part in the International Photojournalism Festival PhotON of Valencia as well as in the Barcelona Documentary Photography Circuit and the International Photojournalism Festival of Gijón. In 2014 he was awarded the ABC International Journalism Award “Mingote”, an Honorable Mention at the National Photojournalism Awards (Spain) and the award Desalambre for video-journalism. In 2015 he received the third prize at the Pictures of the Year Latam awards under the category “individual images of everyday life”.

He is currently working freelance for national and international media.