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

Masats is up on a roof or a high balcony, looking almost straight down at a street corner in the Barrio de la Concepción. The building comes to a chamfered point in the upper half of the frame, and three pavements run away from it in patterned tiles. Everything else is grey road. A black car is parked at the top left, a scooter sits under a canvas cover at the top right, and two women, one on each side, push prams in opposite directions.

Nothing is happening, which is the point at which a photograph starts to get interesting. The corner does the composing: it is the vertex, and the pavements are the arms of an angle that keeps opening. The prams are the only moving things in the picture, and they are moving away from each other, which is either a coincidence or the reason the shutter went when it did.

You can spend a while up there with him. The eye goes to the car, then to the scooter, then out along the tiles, and each time it comes back to that empty middle and finds it still empty. The barrio was new in 1958 and had not yet learned how to be crowded. Masats got there in time to photograph the pause.