Última sesión. Javier Campano

Opening: 26 March
JAVIER CAMPANO: CONTAGIOUS MELANCHOLY

Javier Campano (Madrid, 1950) is a photographer of chance and memory, a traveller of the gaze capable of finding an extraordinary image just round any corner. Campano is a flâneur who loves the street and, above all, knows how to transcend it with his elegant and subtle gaze. I remember very well the afternoon I came across the first photographs from Última sesión in his inexhaustible archive. Those vanished cinemas, with their posters and films, those streets of my city, Madrid, came back to life before my eyes with an overwhelming melancholy, that twilight emotion that should not be confused with nostalgia and which, according to Campano, is inherent to photography. To his, without a doubt.

What was it about the cinemas of Madrid or the cities he visited that so captivated Campano? The old theatres always had evocative names (Coliseum, Capitol, Imperial…), but there was also the architecture of those palaces of fiction where anything was possible.

Campano has always kept track of what he calls ‘the graphic city’; the letters, numbers and signs that form a second urban skin which not everyone notices. And within that other skin, the old cinema posters form a unique pantheon. The posters on cinema façades were giants of ephemeral art, proclaiming a world of heroes and adventures, tragedies and fantasies right there on the street. Hollywood stars, sometimes unrecognisable, were there, beckoning to passers-by from those street-side watchtowers that gradually faded away and were forgotten. The cinemas of Última sesión brought us joy, and reviving them in this book—designed by Bruno Lara for This Side Up, the publishing house he runs alongside Cecilia Gandarias—once again raises the curtain on our imagination.

The idea of staging an exhibition with the material gathered in this book adds a new dimension to a project we conceived out of admiration for Campano’s work. It also stems from a love of cinema and the streets where we have lived so much. It is usually the other way round: producing a book as a follow-up to an exhibition. But in this case, thanks to the vision of Miriam Vilaseco and the ever-attentive collaboration of Pilar Lapastora, Campano’s partner and right-hand woman, the journey is the reverse.

The book also features unforgettable contributions from filmmakers Juan Cavestany and Juan Antonio Bayona. “I didn’t realise I remembered these images so clearly. I’m just about to walk past the posters for Jaws 3, Herbie, Reds, On Golden Pond or Escape from Alcatraz. Fragmented faces of impossible neighbours, looking very much like actors, peering out onto the streets of the city centre and the neighbourhood where Campano used to roam,” writes Cavestany. Bayona, for his part, pays tribute to his father, a film poster painter: “I imagine his hand, wielding the brush, tracing a destiny that was not his own. He was not a renowned painter. His work was not hung in museums. But he was the most influential artist of my career. And in his murals I find something more important than fame: a bridge. A stroke. A dream that did not die. It merely changed hands.”

Together with Miriam, we have selected 28 photographs from Última sesión that are pure Campano, somewhere between documentary and poetry, between memory and chance. There is his timeless beauty and elegance, his sense of harmony, his taste for the visual and for the details that almost no one notices. They compose an allegory of a world suspended on the brink of breaking, the streets so full of life, sometimes their shadows and always the cinemas and their dreams. Campano’s melancholy and beauty are contagious, and his photographs—those of a traveller even in his own city—whisper thrilling secrets.

Elsa Fernández-Santos

BIOGRAPHIES

Javier Campano

Javier Campano (Madrid, 1950), a self-taught photographer, began his professional career in 1975. His early work is linked to the magazine Nueva Lente, a publication that broke with the humanist and documentary vision that dominated at the time, seeking chance and subjective approaches to the subjects captured by the camera. During those years of change, a new generation of photographers emerged in Madrid, characterised by marked stylistic differences but a shared interest in portraying familiar worlds, particularly the figures and settings of the open, vibrant Madrid in which they lived, in close friendship and creative collaboration with other artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.

Since then, the city and urban interiors have been the protagonists of Campano’s images. Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, New York, Tangier, Seville, Buenos Aires… end up, in his photographs, as one and the same city, full of outdated signs, shadows, reflections and fragments, observed with the distant closeness of a passer-by who, as the photographer himself says of himself, “seeks to travel, even within his own city, to take photos of what interests almost no one, and always to reflect some memory of the environment in which he lives”.

He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions, notably the retrospective Javier Campano. Hotel Mediodía, which the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid dedicated to him in 2004; Campano en Color at the Sala Canal de Isabel II, Madrid, 2017, El ojo errante at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, 2022, and Javier Campano. Barrios. Madrid 1976–1980 at the Sala El Águila in 2024. He was awarded the 2013 Culture Prize in the Photography category by the Community of Madrid.

Elsa Fernández-Santos

Elsa Fernández-Santos (Madrid, 1968) has been working in cultural journalism for over three decades. A specialist in cinema, she has been a film critic for the daily newspaper El País since 2019, where she has built her career since 1993. As a researcher and curator, she has collaborated on exhibitions and publications with the Archivo Lafuente , and with institutions such as La Casa Encendida and the Museo Lázaro Galdiano . In 2015, she won the Paco Rabal Prize for Journalism for a report on supporting actors in Spain and appears on the La2 programme Historia de nuestro cine. She has edited Carlos Saura’s memoirs, De imágenes también se vive, which won the 2025 Muñoz Suay Prize from the Academia Española de Cine, and in 2024 she gave a lecture at the Museo del Prado entitled Centaurs of Cinema and the Prado. She has also written for publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and El Estado Mental, and has contributed to books including Francisco Regueiro: la importancia del demonio, Quijote Liberado and Clásicas, modernas y extrañas: Historia feminista del cine. She is the author of the graphic novel La bombilla and of Entrevistos. Manolo Blahnik, a conversation with the renowned shoemaker, with whom she collaborated on his book Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions in a dialogue between Blahnik and Pedro Almodóvar. Her most recent project is the publication of Javier Campano’s photography book Última sesión (This Side Up), about Madrid’s old cinemas and cinema as a street experience.