Tierra Santa featured in The Sunday Times Magazine
There are some moments in the life of a long-term photographic project that make you stop and take stock. This is definitely one of them.
On Sunday 16 August, Tierra Santa was featured in The Sunday Times Magazine, with four pages dedicated to the project in the printed edition, alongside further coverage online.
The feature, “Fiesta! The festivals and rituals of small-town Spain — in pictures”, brings together a selection of photographs from the project, looking at the festivals, religious ceremonies and traditions that continue to shape life in towns and villages across Spain. For me, seeing this work in the pages of The Sunday Times Magazine feels particularly significant because Tierra Santa has already had quite a long life. I started the project more than a decade ago, photographing religious festivals, rituals and gatherings across Spain. What began as a personal exploration of my country gradually developed into a much larger body of work. I kept returning to Spain, often travelling to small towns and villages, following events that revealed something about the country’s history, identity and relationship with religion.
Over the years, the project has had several important milestones.
In 2018, Tierra Santa was exhibited at Instituto Cervantes Manchester, marking the first major exhibition of the project. The exhibition ran from January to March and was an important moment in giving the work a life beyond my own archive.
The following year, the work travelled much further. In May 2019, Tierra Santa was selected for the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, where it was exhibited at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Having photographs about Spanish traditions exhibited on the other side of the world was one of those moments that made me realise the project could connect with audiences far beyond Spain.
Eventually, the project became a book. Tierra Santa // Sacred Land brought together a decade of photography into a single, finished body of work. For me, seeing the project become a photobook was probably its biggest milestone.
Then, several years after I made the final photographs, came The Sunday Times Magazine.
There is also a nice story behind how that came about.
I first met Russ O’Connell, Picture Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, at PhotoMeet in 2019. At the time, I showed him some of the early stages of Tierra Santa. He liked the work, but, as often happens, we lost touch and the project continued to evolve.
Seven years later, we crossed paths again at PhotoMeet 2026. This time, I was able to show him the finished book.
We reconnected, he took another look at the work, and about a month later I heard that The Sunday Times Magazine was interested in featuring it.
I like this part of the story because it is a good reminder that these things don't always happen immediately. Sometimes you show your work to someone, carry on making it, and years later that connection comes back around in a completely different form.
For me, this is particularly meaningful because Tierra Santa is a project about Spain — my country of birth and a place I have spent many years photographing from the perspective of someone who now lives abroad.
The photographs explore something that has always fascinated me about Spain: the way the contemporary and the ancient coexist. Religious traditions, local festivals, elaborate rituals and centuries-old customs continue to play an important role in communities, while at the same time the country is changing rapidly.
That tension was one of the reasons I kept returning to photograph these events.
Looking back, the book remains the biggest milestone in the life of Tierra Santa. The exhibitions in Manchester and Sydney were important chapters, and seeing the project now featured so prominently in The Sunday Times Magazine feels like another major one. Perhaps the most satisfying thing is that the project is still finding new audiences, years after I made the last photographs. And that makes me want to give Tierra Santa another life — through further exhibitions, talks and other ways of presenting the work.
For now, though, I'm simply very proud to see these photographs in the pages of The Sunday Times Magazine. After all those years of travelling around Spain with a camera, it feels like a pretty good place for this chapter of the project to arrive.
