02 June, 2022 - 28 August, 2022
Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid
Curated: Elsa Fernández-Santos

Archivo Lafuente participates for the fifth consecutive year in PHotoESPAÑA with the exhibition Javier Campano. The Wandering Eye, 1975-1987, dedicated to one of the great Spanish photographers of recent decades who emerged during the Transition.

The exhibition includes 150 black and white photographs, documentary material, audiovisual pieces and portraits of some of his contemporaries, filmmakers, photographers or gallery owners who, like him, experienced the cultural explosion of the Movida and those years between the end of the decade of the seventies and mid-eighties.

A self-taught photographer, Javier Campano belongs to the generation of photographers linked to the Photocentro school in Madrid and the Nueva Lente magazine, where he exhibited and published his personal work for the first time. His first photographic commission will be a documentary, for the exhibition "Racionalismo madrileño" (COAM, 1976), with Rafael Zarza. Then, between 1978 and 1980, he was part of the Ojo Móvil audiovisual team (along with Rafael and Daniel Zarza, Rafael Roca and Jaime Navascués), which combined architecture and photography to claim fairer urban planning that would improve conditions in Madrid’s neighbourhoods. During the 1970s and 1980s he worked as a press freelancer and regularly collaborated with the magazines Poesía, La Luna de Madrid and Buades. Through his brother, the painter Miguel Ángel Campano, he meets and befriends other artists, whom he will portray over the years. He combines the commissions he receives as a professional photographer of works of art for different artistic and cultural institutions with his creative work, which he develops on his walks through his city and throughout his travels: street photography of Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Cádiz, Seville, El Cairo, Florence and Rome, New York or San Francisco..., without forgetting the iconic Madrid-Vigo train trip (1986), considered the end of the scene.

The Javier Campano Collection in Archivo Lafuente consists of some eight hundred and fifty black and white photographs –mostly vintage–, together with more than a thousand work negatives and printed material (posters, publications and press clippings).

This exhibition includes around one hundred and fifty black and white photographs, together with related documentary material. The selection begins with images taken by Campano from the year 1975 in Madrid, and continues with his first photographic commission. His participation in the Ojo Móvil team, with audiovisual projects that vindicated the needs of the neighbourhoods, continued at the end of the 1970s. In 1979, he was invited to exhibit his work at the Photocentro school in Madrid, in his first individual part of the series of exhibited photographs is preserved. The exhibition also includes the trips that Campano made at this time with series dedicated to Egypt (1976), Italy (1975-1976) and the trip to the United States for the magazine Poesía (1983).

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