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

Sawn boards, hundreds of them, stacked in open crosshatch so the air can cure them, and the camera pushed so close that the yard, the sky and the low buildings at the right edge are reduced to slivers between the planks. Terrassa, 1953: a textile town rebuilding itself, and a photographer of twenty-two who has found, in a lumber yard, a picture that looks less like a document than like a drawing. The boards come at us end-on and sideways at once, pale faces and dark shadows alternating in bands that bend as they climb, until the top of the stack seems to lean out over the frame.

I am suspicious of any photograph that claims to be merely what was there, and this one makes the claim quietly and then breaks it. Nothing has been moved; the timber was stacked by workers for whom the pattern was a matter of ventilation, not of form. Yet the choice of standpoint, the tilt, the refusal of a horizon turn a pile of wood into an argument about seeing. Masats, in the same years that Spanish official photography was busy producing folklore and dams, is here practising a language borrowed from the European avant-garde of a generation before and testing whether it still speaks.

What the picture withholds is scale. The boards could be matchsticks or beams; the corner where the two stacks meet could be a metre away or ten. That uncertainty is the real subject. A photograph cannot help being an inventory, but it can decline to be a measurement, and in that refusal the lumber stops being lumber and becomes a structure of light, provisional and slightly unstable, like the country that was drying out around it.