Ramón Masats

Up go the numbered boxes, hoisted on their wooden stems until each painted numeral sits exactly where a face should be. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and on down the row, the sellers of a fairground raffle have lifted their stock and, without meaning to, erased themselves. A slip of white paper protrudes from every slot. What was a routine gesture of commerce becomes, in the instant Masats pressed the shutter, a small deadpan act of substitution. Numbers where mouths were, a whole counter of anonymities offered up to chance.

It reads like a piece of directorial conceptual art, the kind that swaps heads for signs and lets the swap do the thinking, yet nothing here was arranged. The bodies remain fully human below the numerals: a ring and a slim bracelet on the hand gripping twenty, a floral cloth draped along the counter, forearms resting in the dark. Masats found the readymade tableau already assembled by the logic of the stall and simply recognised its wit. The street had staged the picture for him.

This is Masats at his most quietly modern, an eye trained by the AFAL group that dragged Spanish photography into the present tense in the late fifties; the Premio Nacional came to him in 2004. The gelatin silver print, made later from the negative, holds the crisp white numerals against a plush black interior with real, velvety depth. Faces withheld, personalities intact, the row of figures keeps its comic dignity, numbered like lots waiting to be drawn.