Ramon Masats, National Photography Award in 2004 and one of the great innovators of documentary photography in the 50s and 60sdied this Monday in Madrid at the age of 92, as confirmed by the Reina Sofía Museum.

Born in Caldes de Montbui, Barcelona, ​​on March 17, 1931 (he was about to turn 93), he is the author of photographs as well known as that of a group of priests playing soccer, in which he captured from behind the moment in which the goalkeeper, dressed in a habit, goes for the ball. Other well-known photos of him are those from the movies ‘El Cid’, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ and ’55 Days in Peking’, all of them filmed in Spain, for which he won an award in England in 1962.

admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willian KleinArnold Newman, Elliot Erwitt, Richard Avedon and Yusouf Karsh, Masats began collaborating on 1956 in the weekly ‘Illustrated Gazette’, and from 1956 to 1963 he participated in the Afal Group and its magazine of the same name. He exhibited his work at the Royal Photographic Society and had a great impact on photographers. Gabriel Cualladó, Gerardo Vielba and Paco Gómez, with whom he created the short-lived ‘La Palangana’ association, to which Juan Dolcet, Rafael Romero and Gonzalo Juanes from the group later known as Escuela de Madrid were later added.

He took photos between 1957 and 1960 of the Sanfermines in Pamplona, ​​in which he immortalized everything from the corridors of the bulls to the heterogeneous public that witnessed them, snapshots that were not known until 1963 in the photo book ‘The Sanfermines’ and helped the party jump onto the international stage. He participated between 1956-63 in the AFAL Group, around the magazine of the same name, created in Almería between 1956 and 1963, he collaborated with the newspapers ‘Ya’ and ‘Arriba’ and the magazine ‘Mundo Hispánico’, and received the Prize Negtor. He illustrated the book for Lumen ‘Old stories from Old Castile’ by Miguel Delibes (1964), and also worked for film and television, apart from participating with Carlos Saura in an exhibition at the Juana Mordó Gallery.

Away from photography, starting in 1965 he produced severals television documentary series, such as ‘Los Ríos’, ‘El Prado vivo’ and ‘El que taught’ and won several awards, and in 1966 he began collaborating on several TVE series, such as ‘Conozca tú España’, ‘Raíces’ and ‘Vísperas de Nuestro time’. He also directed full time the film ‘Topical Spanish’ (1970) and made the television documentaries ‘The Spain of Contrasts’, ‘Winter in Spain’ and ‘A Paradise Emerging from the Waters: Spain’.

In 1981 he decided take up photography again and began to publish monographic books, such as the one titled ‘Our Madrid’, with text by Luis Carandel or ‘Españadiversa’ (1983). In addition, she coordinated the series ‘Tauromaquia’ for TVE, and in 1985 she participated in a group exhibition in Paris titled ‘Catalan Photography of the 50s’. Then came the books ‘Andalucía’ (1986) with texts by José Manuel Caballero Bonald, and ‘Al-Andalus. Islam in Spain’, among others.

In September 2008, the Dos de Mayo Art Center of the Community of Madrid, in Móstoles, dedicated an exhibition to him with a set of black and white works from earlier production (1955-65), with portraits the rural world. In July 2010 she exhibited “Contactos” in Guadalajara, with photographs from his first stage, in black and white, to his last work, now in color.

In addition, he received the National Photography Award many other awards throughout his careera, one of the most recent, the PHotoEspaña Award for his career in 2014. He obtained the Luis Navarro Award for Avant-garde Photography in 1956, and a year later he settled in Madrid.