He has turned toward the open window and given us his back, so that a grey overcoat and a bent arm stand in for a face the picture will not supply. The casement swings inward on its hinge, and through the wavy old glass a harbour assembles itself: bare masts leaning, moored hulls, the flat shine of water crossed by a distant mole. A wooden chair waits at the right, a cushion slumps on the bench. The man looks out; we are left looking in.
A window has always been photography’s favourite emblem of itself, a rectangle that frames the world and holds it at glass’s distance, and Masats plays the idea for all it is worth. The panes divide the port into a grid of smaller pictures; the ripples on the water repeat like exposure after exposure. Interior and exterior share one soft, even light, so the boundary between the room and the quay grows uncertain. The photograph, like the window, both opens and separates, invites and refuses, in the same transparent gesture.
Made along the Catalan coast at the outset of his career, this is Masats thinking like the modern he would become, well before the Sanfermines or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. The AFAL circle he helped form pushed Spanish photography past pretty views toward pictures that reflect on their own seeing, and this quiet room is already such a picture. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet gives the harbour a low, pearled tonality and the interior a deeper grey, two spaces held in one frame, each keeping its own weather.
He has turned toward the open window and given us his back, so that a grey overcoat and a bent arm stand in for a face the picture will not supply. The casement swings inward on its hinge, and through the wavy old glass a harbour assembles itself: bare masts leaning, moored hulls, the flat shine of water crossed by a distant mole. A wooden chair waits at the right, a cushion slumps on the bench. The man looks out; we are left looking in.
A window has always been photography’s favourite emblem of itself, a rectangle that frames the world and holds it at glass’s distance, and Masats plays the idea for all it is worth. The panes divide the port into a grid of smaller pictures; the ripples on the water repeat like exposure after exposure. Interior and exterior share one soft, even light, so the boundary between the room and the quay grows uncertain. The photograph, like the window, both opens and separates, invites and refuses, in the same transparent gesture.
Made along the Catalan coast at the outset of his career, this is Masats thinking like the modern he would become, well before the Sanfermines or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. The AFAL circle he helped form pushed Spanish photography past pretty views toward pictures that reflect on their own seeing, and this quiet room is already such a picture. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet gives the harbour a low, pearled tonality and the interior a deeper grey, two spaces held in one frame, each keeping its own weather.