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

On a quay, a row of slatted wooden crates lashed with rope divides the frame. A man in a pale suit reads a newspaper at the left; beside him another in a light jacket stands with his arms folded and his gaze down. Behind the crates a man in a hat has turned away entirely. At the right a woman in a polka-dot dress rests her elbow on the boxes, hand at her chin, looking off past everyone. A stencilled arrow and the word FRÁGIL run across the nearest crate.

Barcelona, 1953. Five people wait at the port and not one of them looks at another. The photograph does not tell us whether they are leaving, meeting a ship, or merely standing where there is shade, and the crates between them make it impossible to decide who is travelling with whom. This is the ordinary opacity of strangers, held still.

Photographs of departure acquire a meaning nobody intended, simply by lasting. Spain in 1953 sent people abroad in large numbers and the word on the crate is FRÁGIL, and it is almost impossible now to look at the woman's face and not read the whole decade into it. That reading is ours, not hers. She was waiting for something specific on a warm afternoon. The picture has quietly converted her into a figure of emigration, which is what pictures do to people who stand still long enough.