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

A whitewashed wall meets the ground in a long shallow V that runs from the left edge to the lower centre and back up to the right. Along that join someone has drawn a black line, and near the right a woman in dark clothes and a headscarf crouches with a small tin, extending the line with a brush. The wall above is a broad field of white; the ground below is pale, gritty and empty. Nothing else is in the picture.

Masats photographed this in Tomelloso in 1960 from slightly above, and the choice of viewpoint is the whole work. From here the wall has no top, no door and no window, and the woman is not standing in a village square; she is at the vertex of two flat shapes. The line she is painting becomes the only drawn element in a photograph otherwise made of tone.

The picture is often described as a document of rural Spanish custom, which it is, and that description tells us almost nothing about why it holds. What holds is the geometry, and the fact that a person doing routine maintenance has been positioned exactly where the composition needed a weight. The photograph is not going to explain the custom, the woman or the year. It shows a line being made, and it makes a line of its own.