Ramón Masats

Devotional pictures have always been made from the front, all lifted faces and clasped hands; this one is made from the floor, and it gives us heels. A row of women kneels beside upholstered seats, and what kneeling actually costs the body is all we are shown: black pumps half escaped, stockinged soles turned up like small confessions, a handbag standing sentry on the pale cushion. Rotary dials jut from the seat-arms, hardware of an official chamber.

The floor supplies the caption. COMISIÓN PERMANENTE, stenciled in white, reads upside down from where the camera crouches, which is to say from where the truth is. These are mothers of the Blue Division, women whose sons were sent east into someone else’s war; the State gives them a stencil and a row of seats, and they give the State their knees. Photographed frontally, such piety becomes rhetoric. Photographed from down here, it becomes evidence: grief as posture, ceremony as furniture. The image seduces precisely by refusing to be moving in the approved way.

He belonged to the AFAL generation that dragged Spanish photography into modernity in the late 1950s, looking at Franco’s Spain with an irony official ceremony had no use for; the Premio Nacional de Fotografía came in 2004, late and deserved. This gelatin silver print, made later from the negative, keeps the scene’s tonal argument intact: chalk-white stencil, grey floor, the absolute black of the shoes. The photograph does not ask us to mourn. It asks us to notice, which is the harder demand.