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

She stands under a fringed awning with her arms folded on the counter, a woman in a black dress and a white apron whose broad lace bib has been starched into a kind of armour. Her hair is set, her mouth is closed, her eyes are down and to the side, on a customer or on nothing. In front of her, coconuts, dozens of them, halved to show the white meat, and a heap of sweets in twisted wrappers at the left. Behind her, blurred, a 1930s car noses down a Barcelona street and two figures in coats stand watching. It is 1953, and she is at work.

What I keep returning to is that bib. Someone ironed it. Someone decided that a stall selling coconuts on the pavement would be tended by a woman dressed as though for service in a good house, and that decision, whether hers or her employer's, tells you most of what you need to know about how respectability was performed by women who had very little else to perform with. The lace is not decoration. It is a claim: I am not what you think a street vendor is. Masats, twenty-two, catches the claim and does not mock it.

The face gives nothing away, and that is its dignity. She is not posing for him, she is enduring him, the way you endure any man with a camera who has decided you are picturesque. But the fold of her arms, the set of her shoulders, the way the halved coconuts turn their white faces toward us like a chorus, all of it conspires to make her the still point of the picture. The car passes. The people in coats will move on. She will still be there, in her lace, selling.