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

The wall takes almost the whole square. It is the flank of a building whose neighbour has been pulled down, and the demolition has left everything showing: plaster hanging off in scabs, a horizontal row of empty joist sockets like a line of open mouths, brick, rubble, long stains where water has run down. A cable is strung across the top with a small meter box hanging from it. Down at the bottom a three-tier wooden stand holds pots of chrysanthemums, white and heavy. A galvanised bucket sits at one end. In the corner, on a low seat, a woman in a cardigan and a striped apron, glasses on, hands in her lap, waiting.

She has made a shop out of a catastrophe. The stand is level. The pots are graded by height so that the tall ones do not hide the rest. The flowers are fresh and were cut that morning by somebody who knew what they were doing. All of it is going on beneath two storeys of exposed rubble that nobody is going to repair this year, and none of it is apologising for the wall behind it.

At the foot of the stand there is a besom, and beside the besom a small tidy heap of swept leaves. That is the detail that changes the picture. She swept the pavement. In front of a ruin, on a street where nothing is about to improve, she swept the patch of ground where her customers would stand, and then gathered what she had swept into a pile instead of pushing it into the gutter. Masats photographed the wall because the wall is enormous. The photograph is about the heap.