Presentation
A Red Cross volunteer hands out biscuits to a group of undocumented migrants arriving in a cayuco boat in the port of Los Cristianos, Tenerife, on 20 August 2006. A Red Cross volunteer mops the floor of the tent where they were treated moments before.
Biography
Fernando García Arévalo, (Castellar de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1967), is a photographer by profession, but has journalism as his great vocation. He studied photography in Madrid and since 1995 has been working as a freelance photographer and collaborating with the Cover agency. From an early age, he had to write the texts that accompanied his images in media reports. Journalism has been his passion and his way of life for the last 30 years.
His work has shown the world the irregular passage of people through the Strait of Gibraltar. In 1992, he froze the image of the first patera, after spending a month and a half camped day and night on the shores of the Strait of Gibraltar. More than 20 years and 17 countries have passed through his lens. All of the Maghreb, the Middle East, and Black Africa, their armed conflicts and migratory dramas.
In 2000 he won first prize in the Gijón Photojournalism Competition. Among his numerous exhibitions is En lo más ancho del estrecho, a series of 55 images on the drama of immigration on the coast of Cádiz. This initiative was recognized by the Andalucía de Migraciones Awards, which he received again in 2004 for the report Esperanza Rota (Broken Hope), in which he recounts the repatriation journey of the bodies of several immigrants in an irregular situation who died on the beaches of Cádiz.
