Juan Baraja's photography is, in essence, a subjective and intimate document that records states of mind and is interested in light as an aesthetic problem, by witnessing its slight modifications and daily transformations, which he links through clarity and calm. His work is based on the desire to understand, which is inherent to the act of seeing, and on the construction of a meditative experience, a product of the sublimation of the everyday. He is not interested in the beautiful, understood as the immediately gratifying, associated with the spectacular and the conventional. His photography finds beauty in the variety, the smallness, the gradual variation of light, the delicacy and the clarity of color.

Modernity and architecture are his historical and methodological references: his portraits are made with a defined and lyrical emotional charge. They are respectful studies of the character of the inhabitants of such a unique region, which he reaches through the preparation of the shot achieved by the method of working with the plate camera. In his architectural photographs, he chooses buildings that in some way represent the modern architectural utopia, in which rational design and order predominate. In his portraits, as well as in his landscapes and architectural photography, Juan Baraja fulfills his purpose of illuminating, of giving something of truth and knowledge through the image, of sharing something "sincere, naked and resounding", as he himself states. His compositions become metaphysical and expectant spaces, calm and mysterious, photographs in which nostalgia replaces history.

Baraja presents himself as an artisan of photography who returns to film cameras, with all their benefits and complications. His patient gaze and the prolonged time dedicated to each shot go against the accelerated rhythm of the contemporary image, which evidences a conscious attention to the particularities of architecture and human existence that are not evident to any eye, but that present themselves with an unlimited richness waiting to be found by the careful gaze of Juan Baraja.

"I had found the perfect format, neither too long nor too static, and a tool that imposed a slow and precise rhythm in my work methodology, the one necessary to dedicate enough time to each shot, to order and fix my thoughts inside the painting without even noticing the image, allowing me to contemplate the scene in detail (...) The transition to the plate camera, freed from any reflection, led me to a mysterious darkness, necessary to contemplate the direct projection of the scene on the frosted glass, this time laterally inverted and from top to bottom, which made the understanding of the image more complicated. That darkness isolated me from any stimulus around me other than the scene itself and made all my senses concentrate on one. I became, suddenly, an unmoving, unrandom photographer (I never was)."