Daniel Etter: "Since I started studying, I haven't lived anywhere for more than a year."

San Aniol de Ventanas (Garrotxa)He has just arrived in the Llémena Valley, between the Gironès and La Garrotxa mountains, after a long journey from Germany by van. He hasn't even parked for ten minutes. It's the journey he makes accompanied by two bicycles and his dog Omali—which in Swahili means "treasure" or "something valuable"—every time he seeks a few days of rest between weeks of work travel. "Llémena is my refuge between wars," he admits. This year he has been to Lebanon, Syria, Acapulco (Mexico), and will soon return to Mosul (Iraq). He barely remembers it; he has to check his phone to list it all. "And 2025 has been peaceful compared to before," he says.

Daniel Etter (Solingen, Germany, 1980) is a journalist, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker. With degrees in political science and journalism, he is a rare elderly who likes to combine all facets of research. But if there's one thing he's excelled at, it's photojournalism, covering conflicts calmly, far from the front lines. In 2016, he won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in the category breaking news, along with other collaborators of The New York Times, for coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe in August 2015.

The image of Iraqi refugee Laith Majid crying while holding one of his children after arriving on a rickety boat on the island of Kos, Greece, went viral. "I'm overwhelmed by the reaction to this family's tears of relief. That's why I do what I do," he wrote in a tweet after posting the photo.

The Garrochino refuge

His Pulitzer Prize success assures him that it hasn't changed him. But that recognition, in parallel, was accompanied by a small, big life change. A decade ago, he bought Bajo la Quinta, a humble farmhouse in one of the scattered neighborhoods of Sant Esteve de Llémena, in the municipality of Sant Aniol de Finestres, which the locals knew as Can Barràs. Getting there was entirely by chance. "My ex-partner was studying in Barcelona in 2013, and I was living in Istanbul at the time, but a group of journalists were caught crossing the border into Syria, the legal dispute escalated, and I had to leave Turkey," he recalls.

That's how Etter found himself looking for an affordable home that could become a base of operations near the Middle East, because it's good "to be able to distance yourself from conflicts." Under the Quinta, he gradually discovered a buried passion: growing his own food, generating life, on a biodynamic farm designed using permaculture.

The gardening ambition

Etter describes himself as a photojournalist, but also as a "ambitious gardener", which we could translate as a passionate gardener or horticulture enthusiast, to be more exact in his case. In his opinion, they share many things: "The process of creating something, which gives a lot of satisfaction." But the most complicated thing about this project is combining it with a frenetic pace of life. "Since I finished studying 'non' nomadism and its high roots. That's why on the farm I focus on planting olive trees of different varieties—in a valley where they have never traditionally been cultivated—and on making a vegetable garden per season," he says, to the perplexity of a Catalan woman who knows how tomatoes, eggplants, and the last few zucchini can end up coming out of your ears.

Extreme drought

This transformation process for Sota la Quinta took place during one of the harshest droughts in recent years. "La Llémena, the stream, dried up completely! I'd been covering the consequences of climate change from a distance for years, whether it was showing how the Mesopotamian wetlands are drying up, the famine in Somalia as a result of severe droughts, or the desertification of oases in Morocco, as well as on my farm," he says. Following this, and after denouncing the effects of the Sant Aniol bottling plant, he embarked on a tour of different agricultural and regenerative projects in Europe to learn and find solutions, which he captured in the German-language book. Field Trial: My Farm and the Search for the Future of Agriculture (Penguin, 2024).

The roots

That book has led him to want to take a step further. "I realize I can't do it alone," he says. "Now I'm thinking about moving to the farm and setting up a larger property, with workers, so I can sell." He admits that during this decade he has never put down roots in the Llémena Valley: "Although I have put down many roots," he says ironically, referring to the number of olive trees planted. He doesn't speak Spanish well, let alone Catalan.

A decade after the photo that won him the Pulitzer Prize, he sees another change of pace. Etter isn't a photographer of a single moment. In 2015, he followed the journey of Laith Majid and his family on the back of a truck to Germany. But a cruel twist of fate brought them back to Iraq shortly after: their mother was dying and wanted to say goodbye. Only the eldest son, Mustafa, remained, spiraling into a downward spiral of problems until he ended up living on the streets. In a Europe with the rise of the far right, on the anniversary of the photo in August, Etter wrote on Instagram: "For the past few years, Mustafa has called me every Christmas wishing me the best and proudly explaining that he's been earning his salary for years."