A whitewashed wall, a patch of cobbles, an afternoon that could be any year in the 1950s.

A woman on a ladder repaints the façade, her brush working in small, practical circles. One child stands close, another hangs back, already absorbed by something just beyond the frame. Cutting diagonally across the picture, like a drawn line, an older man advances on crutches, his body pitched forward in determined motion, the empty leg of his trousers quietly declaring the loss on which his balance depends.

This is Ubrique, Cádiz, 1957, and the scene could hardly be more everyday. Yet Masats folds these ordinary lives into a small theatre of balance and counterbalance. Ladder on the left, crutches on the right: two kinds of support, two ways of staying upright in a country still reckoning with war and its long aftermath. The woman tends the wall, the man feels his way over the uneven stones; both are taken up with the basic work of getting on.

The children occupy another register altogether. They neither help nor hinder. They drift and watch, testing the edges of the frame as if the photograph were a space they might grow into. Masats does not sentimentalise them. They are simply there, part of the street’s choreography, bridging fresh whitewash and worn ground.

What makes the picture stay with us is how lightly it carries its meanings. Nothing is dramatic, yet everything is in motion: the painter’s arm, the cautious step of the boy, the swing of the man’s crutches as he passes through on his one remaining leg. Masats gives each figure room, but links them along a shared axis of movement. It is social observation without rhetoric, attentive to how people inhabit their time and place, less a decisive moment than a passing one, held just clearly enough to suggest that many others like it went on, unrecorded.