Sebastián López Brach is a photographer, visual artist, and researcher based in Argentina. His work centers on wetlands and socio-environmental conflicts across Latin America, and has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, National Geographic, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and El País. Before the camera became his primary tool, he spent eight years as a wildlife rescuer, working alongside endemic species in Argentina’s wetlands. That time in the field did not simply inform his photography; it shaped from the root how he reads a landscape, a community, and a moment worth preserving. At Background, we believe there is much to learn from those who photograph the encounter between people and nature. So we spoke with someone who has spent years behind the camera in those moments.

What do you remember about picking up a camera for the first time? What were those early days like?

I remember a mix of intuition and discovery. I didn’t start thinking about technique or a career. I started with a need to look. The camera was, above all, an excuse to get closer to people, to places, to the stories around me.From my earliest work to now, the camera has followed a more anthropological search. It’s a tool. I was never obsessed with having the latest gear. I almost always work with a single lens and a notebook. That’s my real equipment. My beginnings were intuitive, almost obsessive. Photograph everything. Try things. Make a lot of mistakes. Spend hours watching how light changed over the same scene. I wanted to understand what happened between what I felt in front of something and what finally stayed in the image. That’s where it all started. There was already something very physical about those early days: standing for hours, waiting, walking, coming back. Photography as movement and patience at the same time. It wasn’t just about pressing a button. It was about learning how to be present. Over time I understood that those first years weren’t about making good photographs. They were about building a way of seeing. And that way of seeing took shape in the field, alongside communities, in contact with real stories. That’s where I found the meaning.

What role does emotion play in your decision to photograph something?

‍Emotion is the starting point. If something doesn’t move me, I’ll rarely pick up the camera. The decision to photograph comes from a pulse, a discomfort, a question that cuts right through me. For me, photographing isn’t just documenting what happens outside. It’s also about understanding what shifts inside. A lot of the time I don’t photograph because something “is important,” but because it affects me. That’s where I find a more honest way of working. Emotion functions as an ethical compass. It forces me to ask where I’m looking from, what relationship I have with that person or that place, what responsibility that image carries. If there’s no real connection, the photograph might be technically solid but completely empty. Emotion isn’t something that comes afterward. It’s what activates the entire process. It’s what turns a record into an experience.

‍What weighs more: what you choose to show, or what you choose not to photograph?

‍Sometimes what weighs more is what I decide not to photograph. Over time I understood that photographing is also an act of power. Choosing to show something means making it public, giving it a permanent form. But deciding not to photograph is also a stance. There are moments that belong to the people, to the places, and not to the image. The most powerful things often happen in the intimate, the fragile, the unexposed. In those moments I ask myself whether the photograph adds understanding or simply takes something from the scene. Not photographing also builds a way of seeing. It defines limits, ethics, and respect. Photography isn’t only what we show. It’s also the space we leave in shadow. We also live inside a vortex of images. Social media produces and devours photographs at a speed impossible to process. Everything seems to need to be visible, shareable, immediate. There’s a constant pressure to record, to post, to stay in the feed. In that context, what matters most is that photography not be empty. Not a reflex, not an impulse. An image can be technically clean and still say nothing. For me, photography needs weight: time, connection, intention. Not everything needs to be photographed. Not everything should become content. Some experiences are more honest when you live them without a lens between you and the moment. Sometimes putting the camera down is its own form of resistance.In the middle of all this visual noise, the challenge isn’t to produce more images. It’s to produce ones that are necessary. And to understand that silence is also a way of seeing.

What was it like to move through one of the most important wetlands on the planet, the Esteros del Iberá?

‍Being in the Esteros del Iberá is, above all, a physical experience. Your body changes rhythm. Everything slows down: the water, the movement, the light, even your thinking. It’s a place that forces you to listen before you speak and to look before you act. It’s one of the most significant wetlands on the planet, but that global weight becomes real when you’re actually there, in silence, watching the landscape breathe. The sound of birds, the constant presence of water, fragility and strength living right next to each other. There’s a very clear feeling of balance. For me, moving through this wetland isn’t only a natural experience. It’s also a cultural one. It’s a lived-in place, with stories, with memory, with communities that have a deep relationship with the water and the land. That completely changes how you see. There’s also something very strong emotionally. After documenting fires and restoration processes, walking those same wetlands means seeing what was at risk. You understand that this isn’t an eternal landscape. It’s a vulnerable ecosystem that depends on the decisions people make.

Iberá teaches you scale. It makes you feel that we are part of something much larger, but also directly responsible for its future. When I work in places like this, I don’t ask myself what image I can make. I ask myself what I owe this place.

‍How does a local story translate into something that can travel, move people, and resonate beyond its context?

‍I think a local story travels when it stops being only “local” and starts touching something human. The specific is the starting point, but what moves people is what we share: the connection to the land, the fear of losing it, the hope of restoring it, the dignity of a community that holds on. For me, the key is honesty. Not trying to explain a place so it makes sense from the outside, but telling it from within, with all its nuance and contradiction. The more precise and rooted a story is, the more it can resonate somewhere else.

There’s also a deliberate choice to avoid exoticism. Not turning the local into something picturesque or exotic. Showing it for what it is: a living experience shaped by pressures that are global, like climate change, development, and conservation. I never think about how to make a story international. I think about how to make it deep. If the story is true, if the image carries weight and humanity, it travels on its own. Because in the end, even as landscapes change, the questions are the same everywhere.

‍Do you believe the images you take can actually change something?

‍I don’t think a single image can transform a structural reality on its own. But it can build empathy for the land we share, close distance, and put a human face on a conflict. When a photograph stops being “scenery” and becomes a connection, something shifts.

In moments of environmental or social tension, an image can be memory, testimony, and evidence. It can amplify voices and keep a conversation alive that would otherwise go quiet. It doesn’t replace political action or activism, but it can strengthen the collective awareness that makes those things possible. If a photograph makes someone stop, feel something, and look at their own surroundings differently, then a change has already happened. And most of the time, the deepest changes start exactly there.

‍What would you want to say to the readers who made it to the end?

‍Don’t lose the ability to be moved. If something stirs you, a place, a story, a landscape, don’t let it pass. Everything starts there. Change doesn’t come from indifference. It comes from that discomfort that pushes you to look harder. Don’t underestimate the power of your own way of seeing. Look at your own surroundings with different eyes.

Ask yourself what’s at stake where you live, who lives there, and what decisions are shaping it. No landscape is neutral. Every place is memory, conflict, and future all at once. Staying informed, asking questions, getting involved, supporting local projects and communities: all of that already counts.

‍Caring starts with seeing. And seeing with intention is already a way of taking a stand.