Yesterday, the boxing gyms. Today, Castilla. Two years after Neutral Corner, Lumen called again for the same series: Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja (1964), this time with texts by Miguel Delibes. And this time the order was reversed — the text already existed. Masats drove to Valladolid and asked Delibes to pin the book down on a map: "Look, it's Tierra de Campos." They got into the car and drove around it. He never tried to illustrate a paragraph: "It was the air in which what he was telling took place." A year later he left photography for television, and did not come back until 1981.
Of that Castilian journey we keep two photographs — the first and the third here. The rest is the same Spain in the same years, photographed on assignment, one village at a time.
With thanks to Jaime Fuster Pérez, whose doctoral thesis on Masats, El roble en el páramo (2007), tells this story.
Click on any photograph to see its technical details and availability.
