Ramón Masats

Why does my attention slide past the waiting fighter, cropped at the frame’s left in his white trunks and dark boot, and fix instead on a scrap of pale cloth knotted to the rope near the corner post? The ring is nearly empty, the canvas glowing under a hard overhead lamp, the ropes drawn taut across the dark; and yet it is that small, forgotten rag, a used hand-wrap perhaps, that holds me. It is the human residue in a picture otherwise given over to geometry.

Everything is arranged for a contest that has not begun. We see only a torso and one leg of the man in the near corner, the rest of him amputated by the edge, so that the body becomes an attribute of the ropes rather than their occupant. The tension is in the waiting: the taut lines converging on the wooden post, the pool of light on the empty floor, the darkness pressing from above. Masats photographs not the fight but the held breath before it.

Neutral Corner made Masats a poet of the interval, and it stands among the series that, with the AFAL group’s push toward candor, modernized Spanish photography and later earned him the Premio Nacional. This gelatin silver print, drawn later from the negative, is what keeps the darkness velvety and the lit canvas from blowing to blank white, holding that fragile scale of greys on which the whole mood depends. A picture of almost nothing, and I cannot look away from the rag.