Javier Porto: The Living Years

This is a fascinating look at the images of photographer Javier Porto who captured the vibrancy of both Madrid and New York. In the transition between the 1970s and the 1980s, Javier Porto was a street photographer who captured images of Madrid that portrayed not only the money and the glamour, but also the darker side of the city streets. In 1984, he moved to New York and became an assistant to Robert Mapplethorpe, where he would meet and photograph such icons as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Grace Jones. This review of Porto’s work is divided into two volumes each with very different characteristics: the first one a passionate visual love letter to the Madrid of Porto’s youth - free and complex after decades of dictatorship. The second brings together many of Porto’s images captured in Mapplethorpe’s now legendary studio space, 24 Bond Street.