Ramón Masats

To look closely is always to magnify and to distort in the same motion, and this grinning young man has turned that truism into a joke aimed straight at the camera. He holds a round magnifying glass to one eye, which swells behind the lens into a great comic orb, while the other eye screws shut and his mouth opens on a shout of laughter. He is scrutinising the photographer as hard as the photographer scrutinises him. The examined has become the examiner, delightedly.

The gag is also a small essay on the medium that records it. A lens meets a lens; the instrument of magnification faces the instrument of capture, and neither can quite master the other. There is something faintly subversive in a subject who seizes the tool of examination and points it back, refusing the passivity the portrait usually demands. His ribbed sleeve is pushed to the elbow, a fist cocked below the glass. The coarse grain of the picture only sharpens its glee.

Masats was the wit of the AFAL group that hauled Spanish photography into modernity in the late fifties, and among that generation few caught spontaneous mischief so well; the Premio Nacional followed in 2004. This gelatin silver print, made later from the negative, keeps the enlarged eye and the pushed-up knit crisp against a soft, grainy dark. Grain here is not loss but energy. The image argues, lightly, that the camera never simply takes: sometimes the subject looks back and gets the last laugh.