of representations of a personality conveyed through dress, demeanour and gestures. Rather portraiture in his work should be taken more literally as a drawing out, a capturing, a lure of the inner life, cast in a particular outer form or physiognomy that acts as a ‘chariot’ to propel this inner dynamism forward into the visible world. The human face is perhaps the most powerful and direct way in which the self, the subject might be signified. It is perhaps for this reason that the majority of Masi’s work before this stage of his work made oblique references to a human presence. He has described this indirect allusion as ‘the human understood’ 4 which takes on another meaning in these portraits. Although the face brings with it the particularity of a presence before us, it also conveys the reflective condition of being part of a wider collective that proximity to another human being reiterates. I use the word reflective because of its associations with mirroring and mimicry in the construction of a ‘self ’ that is intimately tied to the behaviour we detect in others.5 Though this might suggests a slavish copying of another or a form of suggestion that Freud extrapolates from Le Bon’s notion of the herd instinct, it is possible to view this reflective condition as a form of empathic identification and therefore an essential factor in the constitution of group affiliation.

In Masi’s photographs of individuals this mirroring takes on a curious form because the image is often a close-up or, at the very least, framed in such a way that one can imagine standing next to this spectator. However, as this impression occurs several times over within the same series of images, it creates the sense that we inhabit different spaces that are widely dispersed over a greater distance than the photographic scale conveys. Moreover, this impression of intimacy is contradictory because Masi expands the original photographic image to a larger than life size so that it is magnified, becoming almost monumental. As such these portraits hint at an unknown territory somewhere between public and private space and return us to a terrain initially explored by Masi in Shrine (1984) at the Imperial War Museum, a monument to the collective memories of the many anonymous individuals who died in battle.6 The monument then, is typically the focus for collective mourning or celebration whilst intimacy created through physical proximity is often seen as the preserve of the private realm. In these portraits that space between the public and the private is magnified and abstracted from the wider social world placing physical proximity and its attendant associations of intimacy at the fore, as though it were an encounter in which the ‘me’ and ‘you’ is visualised as a ‘being-in-the-world’.

Before I explain this in more detail let me turn to the origins of these photographs in a wall-mounted sculpture called Naked Moment (1987). This was part of the first series of wall-works, sculptural constructions that included the use of burnished metals creating a glow that gave them an almost totemic quality. Like monumental polished badges and insignias, they seemed to signify proud policemen or impassive armoured

4 Cf. Sarah Kent, “Absence as presence, Denis Masi’s constructions”, in Denis Masi, Encounter/Counter Four Constructions 1975-1979, ICA 1979, p. 7.

5 The classic account of mimicry and identification comes from Roger Caillois’s “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1933), translated by John Shepley in October no. 31 (1984), pp. 17-32; cf. Kaja Silverman’s Threshold of the Visible World, Routledge, 1996, pp. 192-227, for a more recent deconstruction of empathic identification and a discussion of Caillois’s text. Photography as a metaphor for the processes of forming identity is examined at length.

6 In his review of Shrine, Waldemar Januszczak cites the artist’s concern with the personal memories of the ordinary soldiers, letters, diaries, mementoes kept in pockets and conversations in trenches, cf. “Master of War and Peace”, The Guardian, 29th August 1984, p. 9.