Ramon Masats - Visit Spain 2 \ 7 - 12 \ 10 \ 2020

 




‘Visit Spain’ was a campaign in the 1950s and 60s organised through  the Spanish ministry of Tourism along with a new look for Franco’s autocratic state eager to attract a growing middle class in America and western Europe that was emerging from the ashes of the second world war.

Although writers and Hollywood stars such as Ernst Hemmingway, Eva Gardner and Frank Sinatra drew attention to Spain the truth was that until the mid-fifties for western Europeans and Americans it was a dark unknown world. The Catalonian photographer Ramon Masats was commissioned to travel Spain and document what he say with the intention that these images would be used to sell the country abroad.

The style of photography at the time was photo realism which captured the austerity of a country limping towards the sunlight from the shadows of it’s religious processions and Franco’s autocracy.

https://www.promociondelarte.com/tabacalera/noticia-481-ramon-masats-visit-spain

When you first enter the space of  Tabacalera there is a large video projection of famous advertisements and clips from the fifties and sixties and my immediate feeling was one of nostalgia and I guess in a way an entertaining introduction to an immense exhibition  at times portrays a darker past. 



The photo above is from The Samana Santa procession in Seville in 1957 and I thought immediatly in Goya and the 2nd of May painting in the Pardo but really also the drawings of Robert Crumb. The man seemed so fanatical, I thought about the kid whos hand he is holding and wondered what type of life she had had. It's difficult now to imagine what life was like in Europe then, the Spanish civil war was so brutal and the beliefs of people to me now seemed so absolute. 




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