Ramón Masats

Whatever opened this man’s forehead happened outside the frame: all the photograph will surrender is the small white bandage above his brow, the flecked cheek, the distance in his stare. The bull is absent, the ring withheld; even the crowd has been reduced to its parts: a hand dangling a cigarette over the ledge, a wristwatch, a fringed shawl draped across the stone. Masats gives us the spectacle’s edge rather than its center, and the edge is where the meaning pools.

The suit of lights does the picture’s tonal work. Its embroidery of pompoms, sequined florals and braid massed at the shoulders catches daylight in a hundred small accents against the matte masonry, glitter that the gelatin silver print renders as texture, almost legible to the fingertip. Note how he leans: right arm slung along the ledge, hip cocked, one hand resting on the embroidered thigh where dark stains interrupt the pattern. The pose is as old as sculpture (the resting athlete), but the bandage and the unfocused stare keep it strictly documentary.

Masats photographed the Sanfermines in the late 1950s, the years when he and the AFAL generation were prying Spanish photography loose from pictorialist habit and turning it toward the evidence of the street. The sympathy here — for the cost of performance rather than its triumph — anticipates the humane wit that would bring him the Premio Nacional de Fotografía in 2004. Printed later in gelatin silver, the image holds that afternoon’s full range: chalk whites, silvered greys, the deep black of a spectator’s flowered shawl.