We have opened the Baylón Archive venue on the popular Calle Molinos in the Realejo district of Granada

Since January, the Baylón Archive has been open to visits from the general public (preferably by appointment — write to us at info@luisbaylon.com) at Calle Molinos 4, Realejo, Granada. We have big plans for this hybrid workshop/gallery/office space: openings, book presentations, talks, and many other activities related to contemporary photography. Stay tuned!

The first posthumous booklet by Baylón

It is a joy that the person who first published Baylón during his lifetime, Mauricio D’Ors, is also the one who has edited his first posthumous booklet, specifically No. 13 of the CUADERNOS DE FOTOGRAFÍA ESPAÑOLA collection. We reproduce here the foreword written by Tyra, along with some of the images you will find inside.

Baylón, beast mode

Will this little booklet in your hands, reader, be the first to be published after the death of the beast that was my father, my beloved Luis Baylón. How sad it feels to write something about him or his photographs without hearing his comment, criticism, or encouragement, apart from all that I sense he still dictates to me (so much!), and how torturous it is to accept that this is how it will remain until I die myself. This may not seem to be the subject at hand, but is it not always the subject?: what remains of us, what we remember, what we omit; the manual we gradually shape while we are here so that others may preserve our memory.

The peculiarity of beasts is that they do this naturally: they accept their end in every gesture of poise, they distance themselves from all gravity knowing their fate, they do what they want without making too much of it and, when the time comes, they deal with death with the same humor with which they lived, with genuine kindness and generosity, attentive to both their own pain and love and that of others. “I have lived very well and enjoyed life greatly,” he would reassure the staff, doctors, or visitors. To witness someone cross death in this way — someone who still had so much left to give and wanted so much more from this world — is perhaps one of the deepest experiences we can live through, but also the forge of the memory that we are and that, indeed, we will become.

That Mauricio now asks me to write a foreword for a series of portraits of dogs and cats allows me to dwell a little further on the subject. Because when it comes to dying, every beast teaches us something; none wishes to die (everything that lives wants to keep living), yet they move about as if careless of it, in an impossible perfect balance, neither turning drama into comedy nor intellect into an impenetrable and stubborn wall. Since they are not governed by the Aristotelian principle, they suffer no contradiction in both knowing and not knowing it, and so they live as though they were going to live forever. And I think we like having them beside us because some of this rubs off on us.

Cats and dogs are beasts, although for the same reason — from spending so much time beside us — they only sometimes appear so. What we love in cats is their elegance, independence, extravagance, fierceness, that pleasant little coat alongside razor-sharp claws that sums up many of their virtues and vices. Baylón was entirely cat-like in this regard, as Barba once said. But he was also very much a dog in his recklessness, loyalty, fragility behind his fangs, or his unconditional devotion to every festive cause, or in that way they have of expressing wonder, sorrow, or fear with a glance (or an image). If all fiction is autofiction, then every portrait is a self-portrait: this is why Baylón saw himself — and saw us — in the beggar woman and the lady and the pair of companions, but also in that cat behind bars or that dog waiting for something from its balcony. He makes us see ourselves in them and in our bonds with them. This is Baylón in his dog-and-cat version, one of the many fleas of the beast that Tallo once said he was and becomes again every time we recognize ourselves in his photographs. So from the memory of the beast many things remain, including these immortalized little beasts, and his death and the long life that still awaits us alongside him. Long live the beast forever!