Ramón Masats

A second from now the shirt will be hitched back onto that bare shoulder, the clapping hands at the lower right will meet, and the whole knot of bodies will lurch a half step on. Masats caught the beat just before the downbeat, the crowd mid-sway, a dark head of hair tipped forward, one white sleeve sliding free. Everything is about to resolve into the next move of the dance, and he freezes it at the exact pitch of its anticipation.

It has the choreography of a great crush without the menace, all elbows and embraces, arms threaded through arms. A red neckerchief flares dark against a white shirt like a single accent in an otherwise pale ensemble; a laughing face crowds the upper edge. Masats shoots from just above, close enough to feel the heat coming off the cotton, and the framing turns anonymous revellers into an impromptu corps de ballet who never rehearsed. The rhythm is entirely theirs, and he simply keeps time.

Masats belonged to the AFAL generation that gave Spanish photography its swing in the late fifties, and the state honoured him with the Premio Nacional in 2004. This gelatin silver print, made later from the negative, keeps the whites luminous and the blacks deep enough to swallow a jacket whole. The bare shoulder glows, pale, at the centre of it all. What lingers is not a single hero but the collective body of the fiesta, still moving, caught between one bar of music and the next.