the photojournalist Miquel Ruiz Aviles has died this Sunday at 69 years old. Self-taught, he collaborated with numerous media outlets including EL PERIÓDICO, as well as El Punt, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, El País, Hoy, Lecturas, Interviú, Cambio 16 or the EFE Agency.
In 1993, together with other photographers, he created the NGO ‘Photographers for the Pau‘, which he chairs until 2012, dedicated to cooperation with countries in conflict. It is worth highlighting the photographic reports carried out in Croatia and bosnian and Herzegovinaespecially Sarajevoduring the war of the Balkans from 1992 to 1995, in which the effects of the armed conflict are documented: buildings in rubble, refugee camps, presence of the UN peacekeeping forces, cemeteries, daily life in Sarajevo and other towns, collaboration with the newspaper Oslobodejne to continue publishing it during the conflict, rebuilding the city after the war.
From 1995 to 2006 he carried out different photographic reports in post-war Bosnia, as a form of awareness and education in favor of peace. Between 2005 and 2006 she made different reports after the tsunami in Southeast Asia to raise awareness and rehabilitate schools in Kinnya and Trincomalé in Sri Lanka.
In May 2008 he moved in Liberia to work on a report on malaria. In July 2008 and 2009, she presented the two parts of the report entitled “Srebrenica, the silence of memory.”
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Born in Purullena (Grenade), at a very young age he would move with his family to l’Emporda. Throughout his career, Ruiz used photography to denounce injustice and promote solidarity. Also to fight against his own adversities, after the stroke he suffered in 2010 and that stopped her career as a photojournalist. Since then, she has used the image as a recovery tool, working on more creative and experimental processes.
In 2010, Miquel Ruiz gave more than 100,000 photographs to the Image Center of the Girona Provincial Council (INSPAI). As a result of this donation, one of the volumes of the “Photography Notebooks” published by INSPAI was born, which was complemented by an itinerant exhibition. In 2012 it premiered “From Bosnia to stroke“, a documentary by Vicens Tomàs and Pep Boix shot in Girona, Sarajevo and Srebrenica between October 2011 and October 2012, in which Ruiz’s experiences are collected.