Los Españoles brings together Luis Baylón’s black-and-white photographs of Spanish cities and their inhabitants, made between 1982 and 2014. Madrid, Barcelona, Murcia, Benidorm, Valencia and Zamora are among the locations represented. That geographical range, combined with a span of more than three decades, gives the book the character of a sustained inquiry rather than a report confined to one city or moment.

Baylón approaches Spain through its people and urban spaces. The national subject announced by the title is therefore assembled from multiple local settings: major metropolitan centres appear beside smaller cities and coastal destinations. Working in black and white allows these places to be read as parts of a continuous body of work, while the long chronology registers Spain across successive periods without reducing the country to a single emblematic view.

The book is positioned in the tradition of national photographic studies such as Robert Frank’s The Americans and Martin Parr’s The English. The comparison supplies a useful framework rather than a claim of equivalence: like those precedents, Los Españoles uses a broad collective identity as an organizing question. Baylón’s distinguishing contribution lies in the specifically Spanish geography of the project and in the persistence with which he returned to that subject from the early 1980s into the twenty-first century.

Baylón, who lived from 1958 to 2023, is joined in the publication by texts from Andrés Barba and Bernard Plossu. Published by RM with Delpire, the 184-page hardcover gives substantial form to this extended body of photographs. For a collection concerned with European street photography, representations of national identity, or long-term studies of public life, its importance rests in the breadth and duration of Baylón’s attention—and in the way a dispersed photographic record is concentrated into a single volume.