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

The print is a narrow upright strip, barely seven centimetres wide, and almost all of it is wall: a stretch of rendered concrete, mottled by damp and repair, with a single small vent set high in it like a slot for letters no one will post. Above the parapet a crane's lattice jib leans across a blank white sky, its hook dangling on a thread of cable. Down in the bottom corner, dwarfed by the masonry, stands a painter's easel with a small canvas on it and a stool beside it, waiting for someone to come back and finish.

Masats made this in Barcelona in 1955, and its joke is quietly serious. Two ways of picturing the world share one frame: the easel, with its handmade image turned away from us, and the camera, which has taken the whole scene, easel included, in a fraction of a second. Between them rises the crane, the machine that is actually changing the city while the painter and the photographer argue about how to record it.

What I find telling is the proportion. The photograph gives almost its entire surface to a surface, to the wall's grain and stains, as if to insist that photography's real subject has always been the skin of things rather than their meaning. The easel is a footnote; the crane is a rumour; the wall is the picture. A young photographer, choosing between abstraction and reportage, found here a way to have both, and left the painter to work it out on his own.