Kim Manresa does not speak as a technical photographer, but as someone who sharpens his eye to reveal details. your book The other Nobel (Debate, 2025) was born from a happy misunderstanding: it did not seek to portray the solemnity of the award, but rather the human periphery of the writers who have won it.
It all started when, photographing unlikely schools around the world, he asked José Saramago for a manuscript to accompany an exhibition. The newspaper took advantage of the gesture and asked him for a big interview. Kim Manresa set a condition: walk with Saramago through the places where she found inspiration. That was the act of curiosity that triggered a method made of walks, conversations and chance.
Then came Kenzaburō Ōe, whom he accompanied on the Tokyo subway, the setting for one of his books, in temples and taverns. And then, García Márquez, in a wait worthy of comedy: three days locked in a hotel in Mexico City without knowing if the Nobel Prize would receive them. When he finally attended to them, he opened the door jokingly: “How much did my wife pay to receive you?”
The series took shape: visiting the Nobel Prize winners not to photograph them, but to live with them. Kim Manresa discovered a pattern: beyond literature, everyone had a cause, a deep commitment to human rights. With Wole Soyinka he went up to the mountains where the writer had been a guerrilla; With Nadine Gordimer he toured the prison where she and Mandela had been imprisoned; With Orhan Pamuk he walked through Istanbul while the author was threatened with death.
The scenes that Manresa narrates show that a Nobel Prize winner is worth as much for his work as for the traces of his daily life: the demolished school where Soyinka studied; the minimal apartment where Svetlana Alexievich has listened to the victims of Chernobyl; the hair salon that Toni Morrison forced him to return to before allowing himself to be photographed. There is something deeply earthly about these encounters: immense prizes living in modest spaces, attached to routines that do not appear on lapels.
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Manresa works with second-hand cameras, sometimes exchanged for African slingshots. He does it because they allow him to get involved: if they break, he gives them away; If the children take them, let them take photos. He is irritated by the photographer who disguises himself as a heroic correspondent, turned into a decoration for another’s tragedy. He prefers a discreet presence: “The photo should say its own thing; the rest is aesthetic obsession.”
His biography explains that ethic. At the age of 13, still in Franco’s Spain, he photographed demonstrations in his neighborhood with a plastic camera. A Swedish television station bought his images and from the age of 14 he made a living from photography. Since then he has documented conflicts, rituals, excisions, smuggling, whatever life has put in front of him. The Nobel project, he admits, is almost a parenthesis in his work for human rights and vulnerable cultures.
Immersed in a saturation of images, Kim Manresa bets on the role of the photographer as a spontaneous narrator. The isolated photo is not enough; It needs a story around it. While social networks turn every trip into a selfie and every tragedy into a landscape, he is committed to coexistence: being, listening, walking with others.
That is the essence of The other Nobel: He seeks not the glory of Stockholm, but the peripheral corridors of life. A parallel award that is awarded to those who support causes without medals, to those who defend a mother tongue, to those who survive exile, prison or threat. Kim Manresa’s camera does not capture statues, but human beings who still doubt, laugh, remember.
His job is to look slowly despite the AI, follow a language that is dying, accompany a Nobel Prize winner to the place where he was vulnerable. Photograph, yes, but above all listen with full attention. Because perhaps the true prize, the other Nobel, is in those moments when life lets itself be told without concessions.
About the author:
Journalist by vocation, provocateur by default. Eduardo Navarrete is Head of Comms & Press at Fintual México and writes columns because Excel doesn’t let him express himself.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-navarrete
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The opinions expressed are solely the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and editorial line of Forbes Mexico.
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