M Le Magazine du Monde
Around the turn of the 1950s, Franco enlisted a group of photographers to promote tourism in Spain. Among them, the young Ramón Masats would free himself from the constraints of propaganda to create a tender, offbeat portrait of his compatriots. Long partly unpublished, this body of work is now the subject of a book published by La Fábrica.
In a small sun-drenched Spanish village, a man in a suit rides along on a donkey. It could be Sancho Panza, faithful squire to Don Quixote, back after four centuries of absence… But everything happens in the background. On the roof of a house stand the yoke and arrows, emblem of Franco’s Falange. We are in the 1950s, and photographer Ramón Masats (1931–2024) reveals all the subtlety of his young gaze. Beyond the man’s apparent poverty, the image evokes submission to General Franco’s dictatorship, a critique of the regime delivered with great gentleness.
Masats had in fact been recruited by the new Ministry of Information and Tourism to produce guidebooks encouraging Europeans to discover the exotic country that Spain then was, with its bullfighters and flamenco dancers. In the aftermath of the Second World War, almost no one visited the Iberian Peninsula. Condemned for its alliance with the Axis, the country was diplomatically and economically isolated. It did not join the UN until 1955, and in 1959 the American president Eisenhower travelled to Madrid, marking its entry into the concert of nations. Before that, Franco’s Spain, still autarkic and turned in on itself, was tentatively opening up to tourism. Under the slogan “Visit Spain,” a group of photographers was tasked with capturing palaces and churches on medium format film. Among them was the godfather of a whole generation, Francesc Català Roca (1922–1998), now regarded as the greatest Catalan photographer of the 20th century.
Like his peers, Ramón Masats was influenced by the aesthetics of the great French photographers of the time, Henri Cartier‑Bresson (1908–2004) foremost among them. But he developed his own distinctive voice, with an acute sense of geometric composition in space. On assignment, he tended to veer off the brief, showing more interest in people than in old stones, more in village festivals steeped in noisy religious traditions than in static monuments, foreshadowing the revolution in documentary reportage that he would embody in Spain.
Some would later describe him as a humanist. He called himself an “anarcho‑nazari,” in reference to his love of freedom and to the Nasrids, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, who ruled Granada until 1492 and remain a refined symbol of the Arab culture of that era.
From 1955 to 1965, Masats, born in Caldes de Montbui near Barcelona, travelled the country with his camera. In Granada, he stopped before the graves being dug by the Brothers Gravediggers of Mercy, a religious order whose sole mission is to bury the dead and tend the cemeteries. Further south, he documented cotton cultivation. His photographs of dozens of bent backs, watched over by a landowner on horseback, conjure a vanished Spain in the region of Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, where vines would soon take over the land to produce the famous sherry wine. Near Almería, Masats noticed a young boy in short trousers walking a pig on a lead, an adult hand seeming to encourage him.
“In his work, Ramón Masats does nothing more than suggest. His photographs are meant to leave the viewer completely free to interpret what they see,” explains Chema Conesa, photographer, editor and curator who has devoted his life to promoting Spanish photography. He maintained a close friendship with Masats, whose “sensitivity to human dignity” he admired. Visiting him at home in Madrid in 2019, he asked to see the old negatives stored in a cupboard. What he discovered, amazed, was some 1,500 unpublished images. He proposed turning them into a book and an exhibition titled “Visit Spain,” an ironic nod to Franco’s slogan. The exhibition opened in the midst of the Covid‑19 pandemic. Masats would die four years later.
