The photography of Juan Baraja serves as a subjective and intimate document that captures the subtle transformations of the everyday through clarity and calm. Interested in light as an aesthetic challenge, his photographic work discovers beauty in variety, smallness, delicacy, and the clarity of color.

In both his portraits and landscapes, as well as in his architectural photography, Baraja fulfills the purpose of “illuminating,” bringing truth and knowledge through the image and sharing something “sincere, naked, and emphatic,” as he himself states. His photographs become metaphysical and expectant spaces, calm and mysterious, where nostalgia replaces history, as curator Santiago Rueda points out.

Baraja presents himself as a craftsman of photography who returns to analog cameras, with all their benefits and challenges. His patient gaze, in which the extension of time devoted to each shot contrasts with the fast pace of contemporary imagery, allows for a deliberate contemplation of the subtle details of architecture and human existence that are often overlooked.

“I had found the perfect format, neither too long nor too static; the necessary one to dedicate enough time to each shot, to organize and fix my thoughts within the frame without yet focusing on the image. That darkness isolated me from any stimulus around me that wasn't the scene itself, causing all my senses to concentrate on just one. Suddenly, I became an immobile, less spontaneous photographer (which I never was).”