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

A bar in the middle of the morning, photographed from a table at the back. Along the left runs the counter with its shelves of bottles stacked in rows; a man in a beret sits there with his back to us. In the centre a glazed door stands open on the street, and the daylight coming through it burns out everything near it. To the right of that light a man in a hat sits sideways at a marble table with a siphon bottle in front of him, reduced to a flat silhouette. The tables run away from us in a diagonal of empty white tops. Filling the right third of the frame, far too close to the lens to be anything but a blur, is the back of a head.

The blur is not a mistake that happened to survive. It is where the photographer was sitting. Masats did not get up and cross the room for a clean view of the man in the hat. He stayed in his chair and shot past whoever was beside him, and the picture keeps the shoulder that was in the way. The same thing happens in his photograph of the Prado twelve years later, where another anonymous head fills the foreground. It looks less like an accident than a habit.

A view is a thing you stand in front of. This is a thing you are inside. The man in the hat is beautifully placed and entirely available, and he is also two tables away, on the far side of a stranger's head, in a bar where nothing whatever is happening and the light from the door is the only event of the morning. The photograph declines to tidy any of it up. It reports the position of the camera as honestly as it reports the man, which is the harder half of the job.