Arkaitz Saiz

In my early twenties I moved abroad to Germany and later to London where I lived and worked for about ten years. I moved again, this time to Barcelona but after a while I quit my job in the business industry and I got an education as a Mountain Guide in Durango, Spain.

At the same time I developed an interest in photography, focusing on mountains, climbers, alpinists and anything related to the mountains. I have always loved photography but I never considered it as a professional career. In the year 2017 during an expedition in Pakistan’s Karakoram, I got involved in the rescue of an alpinist in need. A photograph I took helped to locate the missing alpinist. It was a turning point in my photographic way of seeing, it altered my craft and my purpose.  I started wondering more about the social side of the mountains and photography.

2020 changed that radically, the pandemic lockdown caught me in New Zealand bringing a personal need for storytelling beyond panorama mountain photography. To be able to do that I decided to register for a Photojournalism course at Black Kamera Documentary Photography School (Bilbao, Spain). They gave me the first tools to introduce narrative in my photography, changing the pure landscape and the mountain activities to a new way of seeing which aims its attention to the social documentary.