The Catalan photographer Ramón Masats, born in the town of Caldes de Montbui in 1931 and considered one of the greatest authors of Spanish photography, died this Monday in Madrid at the age of 92.
Winner of various awards, including the National Photography Award in 2004 and a PhotoEspaña Award for his career in 2014, he was also a reporter for several magazines and also worked on television, specifically at RTVE, where he dedicated himself to making documentaries.
However, his great passion was photography, a discipline in which he became interested when he was doing military service. In his free time he became passionate about the magazine Arte Fotoográfico, and it was clear to him that he wanted to dedicate himself to that.
In his long career he worked for different magazines and also exhibited his work in both individual and group exhibitions, especially in the mid-20th century, before his television adventure. He is considered one of the innovators of photographic art in Spain of the last century.
In 1981 he returned to photography and his work, work of so many years, can be seen in different collections of renowned centers such as the Reina Sofía National Art Center, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the Andalusian Art Center Contemporary and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), among others.
He also exhibited in cities such as Moscow, Tunisia, Athens and Istanbul and, in addition, other well-known photos of his are those of the films El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire and 55 Days in Peking, all of them filmed in Spain, for which he obtained a prize in England in 1962
Surely, his most famous and iconic work was created in 1960. It is the Madrid Seminary and its name leaves no room for doubt: in the snapshot you can see a group of priests playing soccer in a seminary in Madrid. You can even see one of the religious people trying to stop a ball, with a great stretch.
An admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willian Klein, Arnold Newman, Elliot Erwitt, Richard Avedon and Yusouf Karsh, Masats began collaborating in 1956 in the weekly Gaceta Ilustrada, and from 1956 to 1963 he participated in the Afal Group and its magazine. name.
He always remained linked to the Photographic Association of Catalonia, of which he had been a part since 1954, with Oriol Maspons and Xavier Miserachs, with whom he had his first exhibition in 1956, and with Ricard Terré. In 1956 he obtained the Luis Navarro Prize for Avant-garde Photography, and a year later he settled in Madrid.
