The arm has swung up over the head, palm open to the light, and the mouth is torn wide on a shout we will never hear. Everything in the frame obeys this gesture: the blurred branches lean away, the sunlight scatters, a second face in the lower corner turns up as if summoned. Seen from below, he is all foreshortened hand and furrowed brow, a man conducting the world. Whether he is directing actors or rebuking the sun hardly matters; the command is the picture.
And yet what holds me is none of this thunder. It is the shirt cuff, buttoned neatly at the wrist of the flung-up arm: one small circle of civility riding the storm. The fury is public, rehearsed, almost professional; the button is private, morning-made, fastened by fingers before any of this began. I look too at the two broad front teeth, the moustache clipped close, the creases the decades have folded into the palm. The shout will end. The button will still be fastened. In that asymmetry lies the whole tenderness of the photograph.
Masats made this portrait of Luis Buñuel in Madrid, one star in the constellation of faces he gathered while the AFAL generation was modernizing Spanish photography from the late 1950s onward; the Premio Nacional de Fotografía followed in 2004. The gelatin silver print carries the scene’s full register, from the white blaze of the sleeve to the deep black of the open mouth. I keep returning to it the way one returns to a voice: not for what was said, but for the way the whole body said it.
The arm has swung up over the head, palm open to the light, and the mouth is torn wide on a shout we will never hear. Everything in the frame obeys this gesture: the blurred branches lean away, the sunlight scatters, a second face in the lower corner turns up as if summoned. Seen from below, he is all foreshortened hand and furrowed brow, a man conducting the world. Whether he is directing actors or rebuking the sun hardly matters; the command is the picture.
And yet what holds me is none of this thunder. It is the shirt cuff, buttoned neatly at the wrist of the flung-up arm: one small circle of civility riding the storm. The fury is public, rehearsed, almost professional; the button is private, morning-made, fastened by fingers before any of this began. I look too at the two broad front teeth, the moustache clipped close, the creases the decades have folded into the palm. The shout will end. The button will still be fastened. In that asymmetry lies the whole tenderness of the photograph.
Masats made this portrait of Luis Buñuel in Madrid, one star in the constellation of faces he gathered while the AFAL generation was modernizing Spanish photography from the late 1950s onward; the Premio Nacional de Fotografía followed in 2004. The gelatin silver print carries the scene’s full register, from the white blaze of the sleeve to the deep black of the open mouth. I keep returning to it the way one returns to a voice: not for what was said, but for the way the whole body said it.