Ramón Masats

The blacks in this print are not emptiness but substance: silver laid on so thickly that the ring, wherever it was, has drowned in it, leaving a single diagonal of wet skin to carry the picture. Light finds the sweat first. It beads along the shoulder, mats the hair into slick points, glazes the long ridge of the spine. Photography is often described as writing with light; here it feels nearer to a rubbing, an impression lifted directly from a body at the end of its strength.

What remains is a man refusing to be a portrait. The head drops forward, face swallowed; one arm stretches along the top of the frame to a fist that stays clenched, as if the fight persisted in the hand after the rest of the body had surrendered. A neutral corner is where boxing sends a fighter to do nothing, and Masats photographs that nothing as pure musculature: shoulder blades flexed against the dark, effort with no opponent in sight.

Masats belonged to the generation that pulled Spanish photography into the modern era from the late 1950s, and Neutral Corner is one of the series on which that reputation rests, honoured in 2004 with the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. This print is a gelatin silver object made later from the original negative: the image passed once more through chemistry, fixed again in the same substance that holds its blacks so deep. The sweat dried sixty-odd years ago; the silver is still wet with it, so to speak, every time the print is lifted to the light.