Ramón Masats Spanish, 1931–2024

Two white cornettes rise into the frame like sails, the folded linen of the Daughters of Charity catching all the available light, and between them a boy sits on a wooden bench, tipped back, while a single hand reaches toward his mouth. That hand is the whole picture. It is doing something tender and slightly clinical at once — wiping, feeding, steadying — and the boy submits to it the way the young submit to being cared for, half grateful, half ashamed. Behind the festival's noise, this is what a body costs.

Ramón Masats made his Sanfermines between 1956 and 1960, in a Pamplona he entered not as a tourist of the spectacle but from inside, having joined a peña so that the running of the bulls would open its back rooms to him. Here is one of those rooms: the aid post, where the gored and the drunk and the simply spent are gathered up. He does not photograph the wound. He photographs the attendance to it — the geometry of two bent figures, their winged headdresses almost absurd in their grandeur, leaning over one small dark head. The tenderness is real and the framing is wry, both at once, which is the Masats signature.

This belongs to the generation that pulled Spanish photography out of official myth toward something closer to the street and the skin, a neorealism that learned from Italy and looked hard at ordinary lives. The image lives in the landmark book Los Sanfermines, a cornerstone of mid-century Spanish photography. What endures is its ethics of looking: even at the festival of excess, the eye goes to the place where someone is being held.