Guillem Valle first became interested in documentary photography in 1998, when, at the age of 14, he traveled to Sarajevo on an art-student exchange program. Finding himself with a borrowed camera in the middle of a war-torn city, he began to intuit how powerful photography could not only be a visual language, but a document too. At the age of 16, he started work as a freelance photographer, mainly for local newspapers. While a student at the Institut d'Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, he traveled on two occasions between 2002 and 2003 to photograph the Palestinian Intifada. Valle started work with El País in 2003, all the while maintaining a personal agenda, developing a body of documentary work on social movements in Barcelona. Over these years, he has worked on such stories as Kosovo's independence, the Uygur minority in Western China, PKK fighters in the mountains of Northern Iraq, the war in Lebanon, and gold mines in Congo, among others. He is currently based in Bangkok, working on issues around South East Asia.
