A half-second from now the raised white flat will come down on the sunlit concrete and the whole balance will shift; for now it hangs, toe pointed, mid-stride. Masats has stopped time on the least ceremonious part of the body, the feet, catching a woman in a dark pleated skirt and ankle-strapped shoes just as her shadow overtakes her. Around her, a man’s trousered legs at upper left, another walker’s white shoe at right, all of them a step from somewhere else.
What a piece of choreography, and nobody rehearsed it. The pavement burns almost white in the overhead sun, and the shadows pour across it in long ragged capes, blacker than the shoes that cast them, doubling every figure into a partner made of shade. There is real style down here at ground level: the crisp flats, the neat sock-straps, the pleats swinging out of frame. Rhythm is the subject, feet and shade beating time on the concrete, a fashion of movement caught where nobody thinks to look for it.
This radical cropping, all legs and shadow and no faces, is startling for its moment, the young Masats already trusting graphic nerve over polite description, years before the Sanfermines or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. It is the AFAL instinct in miniature: modern Spanish photography learning to find its drama in the overlooked. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet lets the bleached ground and the ink-dark shadows meet with almost no grey between, so the picture snaps like a well-set headline, brisk and unforgettable.
A half-second from now the raised white flat will come down on the sunlit concrete and the whole balance will shift; for now it hangs, toe pointed, mid-stride. Masats has stopped time on the least ceremonious part of the body, the feet, catching a woman in a dark pleated skirt and ankle-strapped shoes just as her shadow overtakes her. Around her, a man’s trousered legs at upper left, another walker’s white shoe at right, all of them a step from somewhere else.
What a piece of choreography, and nobody rehearsed it. The pavement burns almost white in the overhead sun, and the shadows pour across it in long ragged capes, blacker than the shoes that cast them, doubling every figure into a partner made of shade. There is real style down here at ground level: the crisp flats, the neat sock-straps, the pleats swinging out of frame. Rhythm is the subject, feet and shade beating time on the concrete, a fashion of movement caught where nobody thinks to look for it.
This radical cropping, all legs and shadow and no faces, is startling for its moment, the young Masats already trusting graphic nerve over polite description, years before the Sanfermines or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. It is the AFAL instinct in miniature: modern Spanish photography learning to find its drama in the overlooked. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet lets the bleached ground and the ink-dark shadows meet with almost no grey between, so the picture snaps like a well-set headline, brisk and unforgettable.