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

A white wire chair fills most of the frame, so close that its curved arm loops out of focus toward us. The back is a fan of thin rods; the seat is a dark disc punched with slots. Behind it the ground falls away into grey gravel, and along the top edge, cropped without ceremony, sit the wheel and running board of a parked car.

Masats made this in Sitges in 1953, when he was still teaching himself what a camera was for, and he chose the furniture over the town. There is no beach here, no promenade, nobody sitting down. The subject is a shape, and the shape belongs to nothing: a chair photographed the way one might photograph a face.

What the picture will not tell us is who got up. That refusal is the whole of it. A weaker photograph would have kept the person in and become an anecdote; this one leaves the anecdote outside the frame and lets the wire stand there, bright and slightly absurd, holding its position against a blur.