Baylón. Madrid en plata brings together a selection of black and white works by the renowned Madrid photographer Luis Baylón. The images span the last thirty years of his work, a tribute to the streets of Madrid and its people. This new approach is about sequence and chance, and beyond that, about the association of ideas that both bring about. What is proposed here is not the classic game of showing isolated images that are made to dialogue a posteriori, but to let the sequence speak, those two or three photos that appear in a row on the film, thus allowing chance to express itself, to reveal its cadence, that sense that it brought without us realising it.

The sequence provides a narrative speed that a single image cannot achieve, and introduces us to the photographer’s true impulse in the shot: the negatives are numbered successively from the first to the last, from bottom to top, chaining their inexorable advance. Chance acts without warning, and although it can sometimes be sensed, it is generally surprising, and the photographic medium is the most appropriate to try to make its powerful continuous action, its mysterious influence, evident.

To publish these sequences that have made up this subjective Madrid from 1984 to 2017 responds to the desire to cultivate a stage that the photographer perceives as concluded, a reflection on a city that has changed as much as the way of capturing it, developed in a negative that has its days numbered.