There is a famous wall in Cartier-Bresson’s Madrid, punctured by a confetti of tiny windows; the wall Masats found in Barcelona a generation later answers it with windows sealed, four cemented rectangles weeping long stains down the stucco. Between these two walls runs one lineage of European street photography, the one that understood architecture as a register of what a society permits itself to see.
In front of the wall, people wait. They gather at the foot of a concrete pole, nearly all of them backs to us, women in dark coats, a man bowed over something small in his hands, and the children supply the light: a girl in a pale dress lifted against the pole, a toddler in a knitted bonnet stationed at its base as if it were furniture. Low sun drags their shadows across the packed dirt, past a manhole cover ringed like a tree stump. Waiting was the great civic posture of those years, and Masats records it without irony and without pity, which is the harder thing.
Masats was in his early twenties when he made this, a few years before he and the AFAL generation modernized Spanish photography for good; five decades on, that work brought him the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. The print is gelatin silver, and the process suits the scene: patient tones, grey rising through grey, a medium that dignifies dust and overcoats alike. What the wall refused its neighborhood, the photograph restores; it is a window opened where the windows were filled in.
There is a famous wall in Cartier-Bresson’s Madrid, punctured by a confetti of tiny windows; the wall Masats found in Barcelona a generation later answers it with windows sealed, four cemented rectangles weeping long stains down the stucco. Between these two walls runs one lineage of European street photography, the one that understood architecture as a register of what a society permits itself to see.
In front of the wall, people wait. They gather at the foot of a concrete pole, nearly all of them backs to us, women in dark coats, a man bowed over something small in his hands, and the children supply the light: a girl in a pale dress lifted against the pole, a toddler in a knitted bonnet stationed at its base as if it were furniture. Low sun drags their shadows across the packed dirt, past a manhole cover ringed like a tree stump. Waiting was the great civic posture of those years, and Masats records it without irony and without pity, which is the harder thing.
Masats was in his early twenties when he made this, a few years before he and the AFAL generation modernized Spanish photography for good; five decades on, that work brought him the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. The print is gelatin silver, and the process suits the scene: patient tones, grey rising through grey, a medium that dignifies dust and overcoats alike. What the wall refused its neighborhood, the photograph restores; it is a window opened where the windows were filled in.