Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

On a narrow balcony two men stand back to back. On the left, in profile, an older man in a dark suit leans with both forearms on the iron rail and gazes out, unsmiling, at a street and a building with a small window. On the right, closer to us, a younger man in a dark sweater cradles a baby wrapped in a pale blanket and smiles down at it; the baby looks up at him with wide, serious eyes. Dark clothes hang from above in the top right corner, and the light from the street burns the whites almost to nothing.

The balance is precise without looking arranged. The rail slants down from the older man's hands, the younger man's shoulder rises against it, and the two heads, one turned away, one bent towards the child, make a hinge in the middle of the frame. The picture divides the world into two halves: the street, which one man contemplates, and the child, whom the other contemplates, with the baby's upturned gaze closing the circuit.

Nothing in the image itself says where it was made. A balcony, a rail, a whitewashed wall, clothes hanging overhead: it could be any town in half of Europe, and it is the title alone that makes this scene Spanish. We tend to forget how much work a caption does, and how readily we accept it. Had the caption named Portugal or Italy instead, we would have found the evidence there as well, in the suit, in the light, in the baby's dark hair. The photograph shows a tenderness that needs no passport; the words underneath supply the country.