Smoke from a cigarette burns out in an ashtray: a photograph about the passing of time. A scrawny cat slips into the house through a broken pane of glass. A photograph about survival. What is it that makes them great photographs? What is it that makes Baylón such a great photographer? I’m neither Spanish nor Roma, but when you listen to Camarón or Jimi Hendrix, you know – or rather you *feel* – that you are faced with a force of nature, a genius, something that exceeds us, that goes beyond everything. With an end result as simple as an image, we are confronted with the essence of life. Baylón knows how to convey that feeling; he is the Camarón of photography. Of that there is no doubt! (…) I visit him often in Madrid; I met him years ago (…) and we used to walk the city together, taking very different photographs, looking, observing, laughing… But we were always in a constant STATE OF PHOTOGRAPHY, awake all the time, on the lookout! And that wandering about as friends became something even more thrilling because our photographs don’t resemble each other at all. But, little by little, I began to see the “Baylons” that he was photographing; he with the square format, me with the rectangular frame of the old Nikkormat (…). One day a critic said to me: “But why do you like Baylón so much?”. My answer is simple: because he is sincere. What he sees, he passes on to us with sincerity. Moreover, the way the images are shaped is also part of the content: they are strong photographs, taken quickly but with a message perfectly understood from the very first framing. (…) Baylón is a master of vision; he shows us reality without make-up. The furrow of time that separates the same woman from June 1990 to December 1990 makes it clear that this is no joke. It is life in all its rawness. That woman has suffered so much in six months. He doesn’t show it just so that we simply take notice. With those two powerful images he denounces, he shouts at us that we must not forget the forgotten. That is why he is such a great photographer: because he tells the truth. He is the anti-fashion. He never speaks in order to seduce; he is far removed from fashions and trends. He is in communion with life: nothing is more “modern” than that, as the well-informed like to say. Because his photos exist so that everything may change, so that we become aware, and not in order to please. Baylón, you are the photographer *par excellence*, and you have perfectly understood the great role of photography: the right tone. Your friend, Plo.
“Transcribing reality naturally, without interfering in what you are seeing. Without composing the scene, without modifying it. Not attacking, not making it up. Photographing people as they are, as they present themselves, and not as the photographer would like them to be.” On paper it sounds easy, but when it comes down to it, it calls for generous doses of skill and instinct, qualities that are hard to measure. To have that special touch, as a cook might say. For a photographer to be truly complete, taking the image is just as important as then knowing how to cook it in the darkroom, especially if one works in black and white, as is the case with Baylón and the vast majority of the great photographers there are and have been in the world. I am one of those who believe that colour photography, with a few honourable exceptions, has something suspiciously akin to ready-made food about it. In any case, and to finish with the photographer’s own words, what he seeks is to refine his austere, no-frills style, and to obtain “forceful images, that leave no room for doubt, that do not need words…”. When silence falls around them, *that* is the photograph! When someone says, “pretty…”, that’s when we’ve blown it.
[…] That keen streetwise instinct, one of his hallmarks, has helped Baylón preserve a kind of innocence in his gaze, in the service of an untainted point of view, not at all sophisticated. He shuns the direct gaze that forces the subject, predisposes them, compels them to pose. He prefers frankness over frontality. Rather than harassment and takedown, he opts for an oblique approach. A lot of frankness, a touch of mischief, a certain boldness and excellent reflexes are the basic ingredients of the Baylón formula, of natural photography as he conceives it: […]
Quico Rivas, Madrid 2007