Daniel Beltrá


Daniel Beltrá is a photographer and artist who makes work about human impact on the environment.
The focus of Beltrá's recent work has been fine art aerial photography of landscapes and environmental issues. His best known project is a series of photographs of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, titled Spill, which have been exhibited in galleries and museums across Europe and North America. Other topics he has photographed are tropical deforestation in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and global warming in the Arctic, Patagonia and the Southern Ocean. In September 2012, he documented the record-lowest summer sea ice level in the Arctic, which were later included in his "Ice" exhibition.

Life and work

Beltrá started his career with photos of bombings by the Basque separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna while he was a student at the Complutense University of Madrid. He went on to work at EFE and the Gamma photo agency while also photographing assignments for Greenpeace. He is a board member of the International League of Conservation Photographers. He moved to Seattle in 2001.
Beltrá has presented his work in slideshows and lectures at galleries and conferences across North America, including the 9th World Wilderness Congress, the Annenberg Space for Photography, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and the ABC Continuity Forum.
Beltrá was granted a commission by Charles, Prince of Wales for the Prince's Rainforests Project to document the status of the world's great tropical rainforests in 2009.

Publications