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

Almost all of this print is black. A band of white sky at the top, then the silhouette of a machine house with one long lit window and figures moving inside it around what looks like a lift cage. Below that the tower's lattice runs in dark tiers, pierced with small triangles of light. And at the bottom, framed by the arch of the ironwork, the Champ de Mars opens out pale and enormous, its avenues of trees laying down shadows, a few walkers reduced to specks, a lorry parked at the right.

The decision here is exposure. Masats printed for the ground, let the structure fall to solid black, and turned the most photographed object in Europe into a stencil. The tower is not the subject of the picture; it is the aperture. Everything we are allowed to see, we see through it.

This is a deliberate photograph, made by someone who knew that the Eiffel Tower had nothing left to give him straight on. He went underneath it, looked down, and let the printing carry the argument. What we get is not a monument but a way of framing: a dark ornamental edge and, held inside it, an ordinary afternoon in a park.