Guillermo Cervera

Early career

Growing up in Madrid, Spain, Guillermo Cervera first discovered the photography when he found a box filled with Playboy magazines his father had brought from the United States. “Then my father learned what I was doing and he emptied the box of Playboys and replaced them with National Geographic”, Cervera said in an interviewed to Lens – The New York Times' blog. It was in those old magazines that he first was dazzled by pictures of surfing.

Initially his family rejected the idea to become a photographer and he was sent to the United States to study aerospace engineering. While in college, he went on learning photography by himself. He put up with studying something he did not like until 1991. Then he returned to Madrid and a friend suggested they go to Bosnia to cover the conflict. The war had just started. At first, he thought it was crazy but finally he agreed. So he sold his motorcycle and purchased some cameras. He was 23 years old when he covered the first conflict.

Bosnia War

In 1993 Guillermo decided to travel to Bosnia with Alfonso de Senillosa to do a story for Epoca Magazine, was his first trip to a war scenario.

Surf and wars

Over the last few years, in between conflicts Cervera photographs surfing as a way to cope with the stress and trauma that accompanied those assignments. He regularly publishes in the main publications of this subject. In Libya, in April 2011, he was with photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros during a mortar attack in Misrata. Both Hetherington (best known for his Academy Award-nominated documentary, Restrepo) and Hondros were killed. In Chad, it was from a brief — though harrowing — detention, where he was threatened with torture.

Danger Close

Combat and surf photographer Guillermo Cervera exists between two worlds—one horrifying, the other beautiful, both dangerous.

Bye bye Kabul

Since 2008 Cervera has worked primarily in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he has worked embedded on long term projects on the daily life of the Taliban, and the economic force of the Western arms market. He has been the first Spanish photographer who published a cover pictured in Newskweek. The picture was a Taliban portrait and it was selected by Newsweek as one of the covers of the Year in 2011. In 2013 he presented at Virreina LAB, Barcelona, "Bye-Bye Kabul", an exhibition of 49 photographs taken over a four-year period in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Anastasia Photo Exhibition

Anastasia Photo is pleased to present Spanish photographer Guillermo Cervera’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition will include selections from twenty years of documenting armed conflict and social issues globally as well as work featured in the upcoming HBO’s documentary, THE LAST PATROL.

In November, Cervera will be featured in HBO’s THE LAST PATROL, where he and two combat veterans join award-winning journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger as they embark on a walk along the train tracks from Washington, D.C. up the East Coast. Making their way through ghettos, suburbs, farms and woods in multiple trips spanning a year, the film offers an intimate look as they set out to “get to know America again” while attempting to heal their war wounds by sharing adventures, laughs and insights from their time overseas. The film debuts on Monday, November 10 exclusively on HBO.

Reviews and Articles:

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Ukrania

Since the beginning of the uprising in Ukraine, Cervera has been covering the different events in the country focusing his work in the daily life of the Ukrainian people. His work has been published in MSNBC.

The last Patrol

In 2012, I invited Guillermo Cervera to accompany me and two combat vets on a 300-mile walking trip up the East Coast of the United States along the Amtrak railroad lines. It was a trip that I was originally going to take with my friend and colleague, photographer Tim Hetherington, but Tim was killed in a mortar attack while covering the Libyan civil war in 2011. Guillermo and I became friends because he was the one who comforted Tim as they raced for the Misrata hospital in the back of a rebel pickup truck.

Our group was composed of myself and Guillermo, two combat vets that Tim and I had known in Afghanistan, and a cameraman I’d hired to document the trip. (Here is a trailer for the film about the walk, “The Last Patrol,” which will air on HBO November 10 at 9p.m. Eastern.) None of us were planning on going back to war again — a surprisingly difficult decision — and I thought we could all benefit from a long conversation about war and why it is so hard to give up. It’s illegal to walk along the railroad lines, so I thought of it as a kind of high-speed vagrancy that required us to move fast and stay out of sight. We carried everything we needed on our backs, slept wherever we could — under bridges or in abandoned buildings or simply in the woods — bathed in rivers, cooked over open fires and tried to avoid getting arrested by the police. At one point, they were looking for us with a helicopter, but they never got us.

One of the most important purposes of the trip was to get to know America in the most raw, intimate way possible. Railroad tracks are perfect for that because they go straight through the middle of everything: ghettos, suburbs, farms, forests, small towns. As the only foreigner, Guillermo was able to see this country with a freshness and honesty that no native ever could. His eye — and his camera — caught the rusting majesty of our industry, the loneliness of our suburbs, the racial segregation of our cities and the relentless psychic pain that so many people are in. One of his most heartbreaking photographs was not taken in a ghetto but rather in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb, where a man in a suit sat alone, with his head in his hands, in an almost-empty church pew. Over and over Guillermo caught moments of great pain and ugliness, joy and beauty, that I have long ago become desensitized to. With this work, Guillermo has turned himself into one of the most important chroniclers of the great American experiment that I know of. To look at his work is to see our country with entirely fresh eyes.