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

A tall dark door, scarred and scuffed, with a small dark window set into its upper panel. Someone has drawn on it in chalk, a big loose figure with a head and a long looping body, the kind of creature a child invents. And there, at the bottom right, is the child: a small girl in a printed dress with a white collar, hair in her eyes, one hand on the edge of the door, her face turned into the gap where it stands ajar. She is looking in. We are looking at her. Barceloneta, 1954.

I think about who drew the chalk figure and whether it was her. I think about what she can see through that gap that we cannot, and about how Masats, standing behind her, chose not to follow her gaze but to stay with her back, her dress, the wild hair. It is a picture about a threshold, and about a child's right to cross it without us. The door is enormous in relation to her and she does not seem to mind. Children of that quarter, in that decade, were used to doors that were bigger than they were.

What moves me is the tenderness of the scale. The photographer has made the door the subject and the girl the punctuation, and in doing so has told us something about how she lives, small against the weathered and the used, at ease in it. The chalk creature above her is a kind of guardian. Whoever drew it left her company on a surface adults had given up on, and she has taken the offer and gone looking for more.