Ramón Masats Spanish, 17/03/1931–4/03/2024

A torero fills the frame from the chest up, and he has closed the picture against us. Both hands are pressed flat over his face, the fingertips pushed up under the brim of the montera, which sits low and black as a lid; its knobbed crown and embroidered badge are the only things in the picture that look back. Below the hands the jacket takes over: rosettes of bullion on the shoulders, rows of sequins, clusters of little pompoms at the sleeves. Behind him the stands of Las Ventas have dissolved into a haze of grey dots.

The studium is plain enough, and Masats offers it generously: the ritual of the corrida, the costume as armour, the crowd reduced to weather. It is a reporter's picture of a man before, or after, his afternoon. Nothing tells me which. The photograph keeps that from me as firmly as the hands keep his eyes, and I find I do not want it told.

What pricks me is the bandage. Around one wrist, between the palm and the embroidered cuff, a strip of white gauze has been wound and taped, as ordinary as a kitchen dressing. It is the one surface in the frame that was not made to be seen, and it undoes the costume: under the gold there is skin that has already been hurt. Here the photograph says what every photograph says, that this has been; that a man in Madrid in 1963 covered his face, and that the wound was real before the picture was.