Ramón Masats

Which one is the singer: the man with his arms raised over the basin, or the small smiling portrait tucked into the mirror’s frame? A publicity card of Lucho Gatica watches Lucho Gatica comb himself toward it, and for a moment the dressing-room becomes a chapel of resemblance. The comb blurs; the white shirt glows; in the glass his face is lowered, absorbed, almost devotional. He is not looking at us. He is looking at the man he must shortly become.

What detains me is smaller still: the stencilled warning on the wall, ordering that the walls be kept in the state in which they are found. Bureaucracy has written its one commandment above the sink, and the photograph obeys it perfectly, conserving everything: the two crossed taps, the open tin of pomade with its lid set aside, the waiting tumbler, the scuffs and nail-holes of a hundred earlier occupants. Every toilette is a rehearsal; this one has been kept. The body will leave, the voice will go on stage; the wall, as instructed, remains.

Masats came out of the AFAL generation that pulled Spanish photography into modernity at the end of the fifties, and this frame shows the method: no monuments, only a backstage mirror in which fame is a man grooming. Decades later Spain would give him its Premio Nacional de Fotografía; here he stands close, unnoticed, exact. Printed later in gelatin silver, the scene keeps its soft blacks and worn whites, and what it hands me is the rehearsal itself, still not finished.