After nearly 30 years as a photojournalist in Spain collaborating for The Associated Press, Álvaro Barrientos has covered his last running of the bulls in Pamplona before retiring later this month. The Medellín, Colombia native has called this northeastern Spanish city home for decades.

“I was always asked, ‘Where do you live?’… Pamplona. More than once, people didn’t even know where to locate it. … ‘And what’s your job?’ And I would say, ETA. That’s my job. Everything that happens around all the violence that the tragedy of ETA generated in Basque society and in Navarra,” Barrientos said in an interview in early July.

From the late 1990s until the early 2010s, Barrientos’ daily task was covering the heartbreaking toll of the Basque separatist group ETA, which left hundreds dead over more than four decades. Since peace was negotiated, the soft-spoken Barrientos, often sporting his trademark scarf, has shifted his focus to documenting unique traditions and ways of life that are fast disappearing.

He still remembers riding in his father’s car as a teen in the early 1970s in his native Colombia when the radio delivered a news bulletin about war breaking out in the Middle East. Bringing to the world unforgettable snapshots of history is what Barrientos has dedicated his professional life to.

He did get to cover conflicts in Lebanon and Israel. But the most indelible contributions of his nearly 30-year career as a contributor for The Associated Press in northeastern Spain -- from which he is just retiring at 67 -- have come from photographing both breaking news and timeless traditions in his adopted home region.

Whether it’s the intense face-off between a masked law enforcement officer and a protester, or a shepherd guiding his flock to greener pastures in the Pyrenees Mountains, Barrientos always got close enough – literally and metaphorically – to transcend the instant and photograph the essence that’s iconic and immemorial.

That empathy has come at great personal cost.

During the violent days of ETA, when death threats against journalists were constant, Barrientos was always awake and listening to the news by 5 a.m., with his cameras and extra batteries at the ready, the car filled with gas and some food if he didn’t make it home by the end of the day.

Whether it was witnessing a police investigation around a bombed-out car or the heartbreak of relatives at a funeral, he always tried to get there early and maintain his position – “because many times I had to stay hidden to be able to take photos, literally hidden, so that I wouldn’t be spotted by either the police or the other side.”

Dramatic changes in technology from analog to digital have increased a hundred-fold the number of images Barrientos takes and transmits nearly instantaneously. He recalls bringing 4 or 5 rolls of film to a soccer match, knowing it would take him half an hour to transmit a single photo, while today he might easily shoot 1,000.

But the point is still to get the one classic image – as he did of Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo celebrating after scoring a goal at a Madrid match.

“I’m there with a long lens, a 400, to take a closeup of him, and I see that no no no, it’s not going to fit. So I change lenses quickly, and that’s when he makes that gesture. So there you go, I have my laptop, I take out the camera card, I see the photo and I’m about to send it, and suddenly I see myself surrounded by photographers behind me all asking, ‘Did you get it?’”

That instinct for the special moment is behind the most soulful of his photographs, both exceptional and daily life moments when the people look straight back at the viewer, establishing the connection that Barrientos had built up even in the most unlikely circumstances.

During the mid-2000s Lebanon War, Barrientos saw a group of elderly men whiling away an afternoon chatting on a bench in front of a wall pockmarked with large machine-gun holes.

“I introduced myself, and I told them I’m a reporter for a news agency, and I would like to spend a little time with you, if that is OK. And they accepted me,” Barrientos said.

Later, Adham, his fixer – Barrientos calls him his “guardian angel” – told him something that became Barrientos’ philosophy on every assignment.

“He said, ‘Look, it’s the first time that I see a photographer who stops to speak with people instead of asking, “Where are the dead?”’ Just like that,” Barrientos recalled. “That comment made me think that yes, you have to stop to speak with people, not just ask where are the dead, but what has happened, can I accompany you, or in some way get in with them.”

Over the last few years, Barrientos’ humanist approach has led him to capture disappearing worlds, from popular devotions in small, emptying towns to jobs that only a few still perform, like seasonal transhumance shepherding in the mountains between France and Spain or the hand-harvesting of rare clams on Spain’s western Atlantic coast.

Text by Giovanna Dell’Orto

Click here to see more work by Alvaro Barrientos.