Presentation
Biography
To define Javier Etxezarreta as a photographer is an understatement, a very understatement. Javier Etxezarreta is, above all, a journalist who documents his surroundings - not just current affairs - with a camera.
He has become a photojournalist guided, fundamentally, by his restlessness, which led him to move from the perfection of the studio, where he began doing advertising work, to seek the unpredictable pulse of the street.
Thus, he gradually left the warmth of the studio to go out into the open and began to be seen at the San Sebastian Film Festival, sporting events, demonstrations, riots, or accidents, capturing a reality that he then tried to place in the media.
From totally controlled conditions, he began to let himself be led by his intuition, one of the virtues that always put him where the news was. Robert Capa is said to have said "If your photos are not good enough, you were not close enough", a maxim that Javier Etxezarreta adheres to the very limit of what is prudent.
One fine day in May 1999, when he had already spent two years trying to run a small studio with two partners, he received a call from the EFE Agency to work with them permanently. It was the beginning of a career that has been going on for two decades as a photojournalist for the agency, where he joined as a staff photographer. A platform that allows him to publish his images in the most important media around the world.
If the comfort of the studio never fully satisfied him, Javier Etxezarreta is not one of those who take refuge in a newsroom. If there is no news, he looks for it in the streets of his city, San Sebastian, which has in Etxezarreta one of its most persevering and sharpest graphic notaries.
