Ramón Masats

A frayed white trouser hem, stained at the ankle, and beneath it a black cloth slipper laid against the rump of a small dog: this detail reaches me before the street does. The gesture is unreadable in the sweetest way. Is the foot pushing the animal toward the cobbles, or scratching its back, or simply resting there, one idler greeting another? The man has been amputated by the frame; he exists only as this one leg extended from the right, dandyish and shabby at once. I find I do not want the rest of him.

Everything else arranges itself around that touch. The cobblestones run their long diagonal like lines of print (writing without words); the curb divides street from pavement as neatly as a rule; far off, a cart’s wheel and a woman in black dissolve into the grain. The dog, white with a dark head, ears cocked, tail curled tight, attends to something up the street we will never see. Between shoe and haunch there passes a small current of tenderness, or mischief, and the photograph refuses to say which. That refusal is its charm, in the strict sense: I am spellbound.

Masats belonged to the generation that, from the late 1950s, loosened Spanish photography’s collar — the AFAL circle, ironic and quick, for whom fiesta and street were one continuous theater. His Sanfermines pictures made his name; the Premio Nacional de Fotografía followed in 2004. This gelatin silver print, made later, keeps the scene’s soft greys intact: a touch, printed, still warm.