Ramón Masats

It is the thumb I keep returning to: one blunt thumb pressed to the lower edge of a folded newspaper, the whole flimsy roof of print depending on that small pressure. Everything else in the picture is a face turned upward, creased, mouth ajar, the eyes fixed on some spectacle above the frame. But the thumb is doing the humble labour that lets the man forget himself and simply watch. Without it, the paper falls, and the reverie ends. A whole composure hangs from a fingertip.

The newspaper has been made into shade, a peaked tent against the summer glare, and the masthead still shows its half word, España, printed upside down against the sky. There is something almost devotional in the pose, a man crowned in yesterday’s news, though what he watches is only the bullring. A companion’s hand rests on his shoulder. His plaid shirt, the deep furrows of his brow, the gap where a tooth is missing — these are not arranged, and that is exactly what I cannot let go.

Masats made such faces his subject during the Franco years, when the AFAL group turned Spanish photography away from stiffness toward this closeness, this human grain; the state gave him its Premio Nacional in 2004. The print is gelatin silver, drawn later from the negative, and in it the whites of the paper and the greys of the skin are held in a single tender scale. I look, and the improvised hat becomes the most serious thing in the world.