The San Fermín Festivities (Spanish: Los Sanfermines) is a photographic essay by Catalan photographer Ramón Masats, made in Pamplona, Spain, over several trips from 1956 to 1960, when he joined a peña (a local social club) to photograph San Fermín from within the celebration rather than from its margins.
Masats first arrived in 1956 as an amateur, treating the trip as a personal test while he shifted from the family salted-fish business toward a professional life in photography. These years coincide with a broader shift: Spain was moving from postwar autarky toward greater international openness, and the dictatorship promoted a curated national image through tourism campaigns. Although the festival was already internationally legible, Masats photographs how it is lived on the ground—under post–Civil War scarcity, layered authority, and ritual habit.
Visually, the images stay close to bodies and states of attention—anticipation, exhaustion, intoxication, stillness—often in the quieter intervals around the bull runs and ceremonies. A recurring vertical format keeps figures upright and sometimes alone, turning streets, doorways, and the bullring into settings for brief, self-contained actions. Working mainly in black-and-white, he relies on natural light and sharp tonal shifts—sunlit façades, deep shadow, night scenes.
Masats used small, portable 35mm cameras with films such as Kodak Tri-X; the San Fermín work is chiefly black-and-white reportage, with any color experiments remaining secondary at the time. Rather than using traditional focusing methods, Masats famously declared, "The rangefinder is me," often setting his camera to a fixed distance and aperture and then moving his own body forward or backward to achieve focus. This tactile approach to the equipment allowed him to shoot from unconventional angles, such as from the hip, to capture gestures that were unperformed and unfiltered, a core tenet of the humanist movement he helped lead in Spain.
First published in 1963, Los Sanfermines became a reference point in the renewal of Spanish reportage, linked to the energies around AFAL and Masats’ involvement with La Palangana (a late-1950s Madrid circle associated with more direct, everyday photography). Later reissues and exhibitions have kept the work in circulation, and it is often read as a "baptism of fire" that defines Masats’ early narrative approach: he concentrates on the fringes—fatigue, wine, waiting, crowd dynamics—rather than only the sanctioned highlights. After turning to filmmaking (1965–1981), he returned to photography in 1981 working exclusively in color; in books such as Toro (1998), bullfighting reappears less as lived report than as a field of geometry, color, and form.
