Ramón Masats

A second earlier she was not yet touching her glasses; a second later her hand will fall and she will look up, or doze. Masats catches the in-between, a tired woman resting on a folding stool in the Prado, wrapped in a heavy fur, a cylindrical black handbag balanced in her lap, one finger raised to the frame of her spectacles. Above her, sealed forever in his ornate frame, a mustachioed gentleman by an old master keeps his own steadier gaze.

What detains me is the rhyme the camera has stolen: the painted man’s lifted brow and the living woman’s lifted hand, two gestures a century and a half apart, caught by chance in a single frame. He is composed for eternity; she is merely tired, her crossed legs ending in worn black heels, her fur slipping off the edge of the little chair. The painting will outlast her, yet it is her small, unrepeatable fatigue that I believe. Photography loves precisely what will not stay.

This belongs to the Madrid pictures of the mid-sixties in which Masats, schooled by the AFAL group’s appetite for the candid, turned his wit on museums, churches and the street, the body of work that would bring him the Premio Nacional. This gelatin silver print, made later from the negative, gives the encounter its full grey register, from the dark oil of the framed portrait to the terrazzo floor and its metal grate. A joke, a memento mori, and a tenderness, all of it held in one exposure.