A whitewashed room. A table with a cloth. Wine bottles, a plate of food, a glass or two. Folding chairs along the back wall. So far, so ordinary. But look up and the picture turns strange. Dozens of wrought-iron lanterns hang from the ceiling, inverted, their poles dangling like a processional forest frozen mid-step. The outside folded indoors and suspended there, waiting.

This is El Rocío, Almonte, 1959. Ramón Masats went south, as many Spanish photographers of his generation did, drawn by Andalusian ritual. The Romería de El Rocío is one of those collective events photography loves and struggles with in equal measure: too large, too chaotic, too devotional to be caught in a single frame. The temptation is to go for the crowd, the dust, the ecstasy. Masats did something else. He found a room where the instruments of ceremony were stored alongside the leftovers of a meal, and he photographed that.

The lanterns would have been carried through the marshlands at night, flames lit, toward the sanctuary of the Virgen del Rocío. Here they are at rest, stripped of fire and purpose, massed with a density that gives the upper half of the image a rhythmic weight the lower half quietly resists. The table anchors everything. Its white cloth, the dark bottle, the plate — markers of ordinary time, of people who paused to eat and who have now stepped out of the frame.

What Masats understood, and what makes this picture so good, is that the meaning of a ritual is not confined to its spectacular moments. It lives just as fully in the margins, in the room where the lanterns rest and the wine goes warm. The composition draws you along the table's axis, from the bottle at the bottom edge to the lanterns clustered against the far wall, and the geometry feels discovered rather than imposed — the logic of the place doing the work. That is a quality in the best Spanish photography of this period: a trust in what is already there, and the discipline not to rearrange it.