Ramón Masats Spanish, 17/03/1931–4/03/2024

Dawn, Cologne, 1960: a cobbled street curves away toward a block of steep-roofed brick houses, their windows still dark. A Volkswagen Beetle is parked at the kerb beneath a street lamp, nose toward us, pale and round as a pebble. Further along, small enough to miss, a bubble car sits by a triangular road sign. On the left, a row of galvanised dustbins with their lids on waits at the edge of a paved path, and a hedge and a dark conifer close the corner. Nobody is out yet.

Masats had left Spain for the first time, and what he photographed was not the famous cathedral but the ordinary morning of a rebuilt city. Fifteen years after the war, Cologne looks tidy, thrifty and slightly shy: the two cars are the smallest and cheapest Germany made, the bins are full, the cobbles have been relaid stone by stone. The photograph is a sociology of the economic miracle told entirely through parked objects.

It is also a study in how a street photograph can work without a street's usual currency, which is people. The Beetle takes the place of a figure; the bubble car is its distant companion; the bins stand in a group like neighbours waiting for a bus. Masats, the great photographer of Spanish crowds and rituals, here tests what remains of his eye when the crowd is asleep, and finds that the city, left alone, composes itself.