Samuel Nacar

Documentary Photographer

Biography 

Samuel Nacar (b. 1992) is a Mediterranean documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on migration, social conflict, and depopulation. His projects explore two key aspects of migration: the impact on the communities left behind after mass emigration and migration routes as spaces of resistance, highlighting the lack of safe pathways and the hardships faced by those in transit. His work is deeply rooted in the Mediterranean region, exploring its social, economic, and environmental transformations.

He has worked as a freelance contributor for Ruido Photo, Revista 5W, among others. He began his career as an independent journalist in 2015 in Lesvos, covering the refugee crisis. Since then, he has spent more than a decade documenting the European border system and human rights violations across the continent.

His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Joana Biarnés Grant for Cartas a Mariví, a project on Spain’s deindustrialization and the decline of peripheral cities. Currently, he focuses on deindustrialization and depopulation in Spain and the exodus along the Atlantic migration route, analyzing how migration affects those who choose to stay.

Photos: The Shadows Already Have Names

Syria’s long civil war reached a turning point when on 8 December 2024, after a two-week upsurge in success, rebel forces took the capital Damascus with little resistance, toppling President Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year regime. The rebel forces immediately began to free inmates from a vast network of detention centers, with the much-feared Sednaya military prison at its core. Survivors’ accounts revealed the extent of the Assad regime’s systematic detention, torture, and secret execution of its opponents, which transformed its already brutal prison system into a weapon of war.