Javier Campano: Wandering Eye
This book contains a careful selection of photographs from the set of nearly 900 images by Javier Campano that the Lafuente Archive holds, which were seen in the exhibition dedicated to him at the PHotoESPAÑA festival in Madrid. The photographic selection is divided into three axes:
A series of images from the first stage of Javier Campano’s artistic career, which stands out for its strong documentary nature. Time when he was part of a group that promoted fairer urbanism and claimed the needs of Madrid’s neighborhoods.
A section focused on the photographic production of him during his travels in Spain and in countries such as Egypt, Italy, France or the United States.
A final sequence dedicated to the black and white photographs that were exhibited in his first exhibitions, together with a selection of Polaroids.
“I really like to wander around and get lost in cities. I like to travel and see things with new eyes: the hotels in a city, with those rooms from which you can see the city from the window; the shop windows and signs; the bars, each with a different name; the markets and book shops…
This project began on the day they gave me my first camera, with which I went out into the street to learn – to learn to take pictures and to learn to look…
I don’t have an end planned. It will last as long as I last wandering around with my camera!”
Javier Campano is known for his documentaries on the streets of Madrid. This volume compiles a selection of photographs from his early career, focusing on lesser-known aspects of his practice and his photographic production during his international travels.
About the Author
Self-taught, Javier Campano (Madrid, 1950) started working professionally as a photographer in 1975. His beginnings are linked to the Nueva Lente magazine, a publication that broke away from the humanist and documentary view predominating in those times, seeking risky and subjective approximations to the motifs the camera grasped. In those years of transformation, a new generation of photographers appeared in Madrid. They came with marked stylistic differences, but a common interest in portraying nearby worlds, above all the figures and scenarios of the open and plethoric Madrid in which they lived, in a close and creative friendship with other artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians. Since then, the city and its urban interiors have been the main characters in Campano’s images. He has released many books and has been presented in many exhibitions, both solo and collective.
