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

A knot of bodies in bright sun, everyone bending toward something just below the frame. The man at the centre, in a dark hat and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, has a cigarette in his mouth and a flat round tin in his hand, its label ending in the name López. To his right, a younger man in a dark jacket holds a bundle of something pale and fibrous. A woman with her hair pinned up turns her back to us, handbag on her arm, and the shadow of another figure falls across her coat. Above them, on a rooftop, a lone man stands against the sky.

Masats made this in the Barceloneta in 1954, the fishermen's quarter, and the picture is a lesson in how documentary photography can be built out of a refusal to explain. We are never told what everyone is looking at. The transaction, if it is one, happens out of sight, and the photographer keeps his lens at the height of the crowd, so we join them without being admitted. That withholding is a decision, and it is what separates this from reportage: the image is about attention itself, about the way a street crowd organises its bodies around a point of interest.

There is a great deal of touch in the picture: the hand on the tin, the fingers on the pale bundle, the strap of the bag, the shadow laid across a shoulder like a palm. Contemporary photographers who work on the street inherit exactly this problem, of how to be inside the event and outside it at once, and Masats solves it with the cigarette, which anchors the central figure's face and gives the whole scramble a fixed point. The rooftop figure, tiny and alone, is the photographer's double, watching the watchers.