Réfractaires de Jules Vallès, les personnages qui inhabit Baylón’s images have “the street as their homeland.” This photographer enjoys walking through cities where the people have not yet been completely thrown out, driven away by modernity. Madrid, Tangier, Lisbon or Benares. Ignoring fashion and the rules of the day, he freely portrays anonymous individuals. In black and white, with a Rolleiflex. It is candid, furtive, direct, often tender.

In Marseille — which he discovers, almost hallucinating, over the course of a scorching August month — he willingly loses himself and quietly weaves his way into the living fabric of the city. Absolute exoticism for the Madrilenian? Perhaps, but the Marseillais seen through Luis’s eyes are, as always in his work, flesh-and-blood beings, strange yet very real, in transit or waiting for what?…

Pierre-Yves Marzin