Judges
Cortona On The Move / BarTur Grant​​​​​
Supported by Visual Storytellers Fund
2025 WINNER
​Daniel Ochoa de Olza
Daniel Ochoa de Olza is a photographer whose practice moves between documentary and artistic languages. With a background in photojournalism and years of fieldwork across diverse regions, his recent focus has shifted toward long-term projects that reflect on the politics of perception, the symbolic dimensions of landscape, and the tensions between individual experience and collective narratives.



His work often engages with the boundaries—both visible and invisible—that shape human lives: not only physical or political frontiers, but also the limits of representation, memory, and identity. Using photography as a space for observation and reflection, he explores how images can function as tools for both testimony and interpretation.


Ochoa de Olza’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and are part of both public and private collections. His work has received numerous awards and recognitions, and has been published by leading editorial platforms. He also teaches and lectures regularly, sharing his experience with emerging photographers and interdisciplinary audiences.


Grounded in research but open to ambiguity, his projects combine visual precision with conceptual depth, often unfolding as essays in image form. His approach is rooted in presence, slowness, and a commitment to exploring what resists simplification.
The Gap / La Frontera is a long-term photographic project that explores the U.S.–Mexico border wall, questioning what it truly represents within its natural context: a visual inquiry into how power materializes through space, through a physical barrier—an artificial disruption imposed on a continuous landscape.
These images approach this line of separation from minimal distances, focusing on open spaces—deserts, seas, hills, plains—where geographic and visual continuity undermines the official rhetoric of difference. From such proximity, the border emerges as an imposition alien to the terrain it occupies: a structure attempting to impose a boundary where the land itself offers none.
In its mere existence, the wall enacts a form of violence that goes beyond its physical function: it is also an architecture of rejection. It transforms a shared landscape into a contested space, imposing artificial difference on continuous geography. The border becomes not just a line, but a wound—both visual and conceptual.
The wall claims to provide security, but its true purpose lies in signaling control—performing sovereignty, enforcing inequality, and turning fear into policy. The images unfold as quiet observations of a structure that leaves behind dissonance, tension, and unresolved meanings, as well as human scars born of exploitation, displacement, and fear.
The Gap resists spectacle.
La Frontera / The Gap
Part 1: Interview with Daniel Ochoa de Olza
What first drew you to the U.S.–Mexico border as a subject? Was there a specific moment or image that sparked this project?
What drew me was not a spectacle, but a dissonance. I was struck by how such a vast, disruptive structure could remain visually absent (or represented simplistically and flatly) in the collective imagination. The wall existed in political discourse, data, fear—but rarely appeared in images that revealed its actual presence in space. Mostly represented near cities, mere dots along a 3000-kilometer line on a map. As someone shaped by histories of walled cities and migrations, I felt compelled to witness what this architecture was doing to the land, its people—and to our perception of both.
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My first direct encounter with the border was in Tijuana. After kilometers of a triple-layered fence, I witnessed—with the astonishment reserved for rational beings—how an attempt had been made to erect a fence into the sea itself, and how that same massive structure abruptly vanishes just as the last houses of the city disappear. This surreal contradiction became the visual and conceptual trigger that ignited my deep curiosity about the border.
Your work approaches the border not as a line, but as a rupture. How did you develop this perspective, both visually and conceptually?
A line can suggests order—continuity, containment, the edge of something coherent (Can we assume every line suggests order and not also conflict? Probably is a matter of context). But what I found along the U.S.–Mexico border wasn’t a line at all. It was a rupture—an imposed geometry violently interrupting terrain that had no natural need for division.
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Conceptually, I came to see the wall as an architecture of rejection. It doesn't merely divide; it enacts exclusion, carving difference into a continuous landscape. Its violence is not just physical but symbolic: geography transformed into ideology.
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Photographically, I sought to confront our preconceived idea of a wall, the cataloged replica in collective memory: the strange sight of a wall ending abruptly or becoming a thin line in an immense landscape—visual nonsense made steel. Standing close to the wall felt akin to reaching the outer wall of a vast prison—one without clear inmates or wardens. It disorients our notion of inside and outside. Who is protected from whom? Does it confine more than defend?
