Ramón Masats

The dance is nowhere here; what the frame withholds is the very thing these women are dressed for. No stage, no palmas, no audience, only the interval before, four flamenco dresses folded into a bench under a mounted bull’s head, the black polka dots holding still. Masats photographs the wait, which is the part no poster ever advertises, and the picture is sharper for its refusal to give us the performance it promises.

What a lineup. The dancer at centre meets the lens dead-on, kohl-lined and unbothered, a pale carnation pinned above her brow; to the right another tips her head back mid-laugh, a finger to her lip, a rose blooming from her chignon; a third turns in profile behind a great disc of an earring. Their ruffled skirts spill and overlap into one continuous flounce, white dotted with black, so the bench becomes a single extravagant costume. Above them the bull presides, glossy and horned, a decoration and a warning at once.

This is Jerez in the Andalusian south, and Masats works it like a backstage reporter, the same eye that gave us the Sanfermines and the boxing of Neutral Corner. He belonged to the AFAL generation that dragged Spanish photography into modern life, and the Premio Nacional de Fotografía later confirmed it. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet keeps its full register of blacks, the bull, the dots, the shadowed corner, against skin lit like stage light. Glamour caught off-duty, and all the more glamorous for being between numbers.