Ramón Masats

How many white shirts can one frame hold before the crowd stops being a gathering of individuals and becomes a kind of weather? Masats looked down on the young men of Pamplona from above, and from that height their raised arms, their open collars, their scattered straw hats read as a single luminous surge. One boy at the centre is being hoisted, his rope-soled espadrilles laced up bare shins, his face tipped back in the abandon the fiesta permits. Nothing here has been arranged; it has only been seen.

To photograph a crowd is to make a choice about distance, and the elevation here is tender rather than clinical. We are close enough to catch a red sash cinched at a waist, a wristwatch, the crisscross of laces climbing a calf, yet far enough to feel the tide of bodies pressing outward from the frame. A single dark cap interrupts the whiteness. The picture holds joy and near-suffocation in the same instant, and does not pretend to separate them.

Masats belonged to the AFAL circle that pulled Spanish photography, in the grey middle of the Franco years, toward the vitality of the street. He would later receive the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. What survives here is a gelatin silver print, drawn later from the negative, its whites bright and its shadows deep enough to give the throng its architecture. Look long and the faces separate again, each young man briefly himself before the crowd reclaims him, and the whiteness closes back over.