Early in 2027 we are opening an exhibition devoted to just the two of them: Joel Meyerowitz and Ramón Masats, face to face for the first time. Twelve vintage prints by each. Twenty-four photographs, and no more.
Look at what the two of them are holding. A woman standing in a lake in New York in 1970, throwing hers into the air. An old man crossing a whitewashed street in Ubrique in 1957 on two of them, past a woman painting the wall and two small children. Thirteen years and an ocean apart, and the same object: a pair of crutches. One man leans on them to cross a street. One woman lets hers go.
That is the pairing that convinced me, and this is what Joel wrote when he saw it: "What a warm and generous letter and your pairing and explanation show me how connected you are to the two of us, and how much fun you'll have finding the beauty and the spirit in the relationships."
We chose them one afternoon in September, in his house in London, opening the boxes one by one.
At first the two of them have nothing in common. Masats was born in 1931 outside Barcelona and photographed village fiestas, rituals and the rural world, in black and white. Meyerowitz was born in 1938 in New York and spent a career making colour serious. What they share isn't in the biographies. It's an eye that belongs to nobody else, and the nerve to follow it.
That is why we do this. You can hang two photographs next to each other and find out whether anything happens between them. Most of the time nothing does. Here something did, and there are eleven more pairings to find.
If it goes where we think it is going, it ends as a book, with a text by one of the curators we most admire.
Here Joel's journey ends, eleven chapters after it began. Tomorrow a new one starts, with another of our photographers.
Joel Meyerowitz, "Anawanda Lake, New York", 1970. Ramón Masats, "Ubrique, Cádiz", 1957.
