as the spectacle unfolds. In each image behind or alongside the individual portrait there is a mass of heads and backs whilst in the middle distance the terraces seem filled with people; the whole surface becomes a sea of variegated shades of dark and light. From this mass of light and shade the foreground is sharper in detail, giving us textures of hair, skin, clothing and ensuring the luminous quality of the individual face arrests and holds our attention. Though there are instances of what Barthes might describe as the punctum: the glint of sunlight bouncing off a pair of sunglasses, a lock of pale blonde hair framing a face turned partly towards us, a single delicate pearl earring glowing against the shadows of a soft neck, something else retains our interest. Each portrait is carefully ‘framed’ by a sea of distant figures and a wall of backs turned away from us. What holds our attention in these portraits is partly the impression that each of these faces is ‘lit’ by a single source.

Though one might argue that his focus on the spectators of the Palio suggest a turning away from the central event, Masi’s own intentions are to reinstate its importance as a ritual that is lived in the minds and hearts of those who flock to see it. Just as there is an inversion between subject and object in Naked Moment, the notion of the centre and the periphery, the monumental and the banal are entirely reversed in these photographs. One might even say that each of the portraits is reflective of Masi’s overwhelming emotion as he takes these photographs with a simple camera and single lens in the midst of the crowd.15 Describing his experience of the Palio as a spectacle that consumed, swallowed and possessed him, for Masi the drama of the spectacle lay as much in the centre of the crowd as in the race itself.16 Those faces that he captures can almost be seen as reflective of his own sense of immersion. The emanation of significance is one that constantly circulates in a series of decentralised networks of energy that collapse any traditional notion of hierarchy. This decentralised flow does not privilege the spectacle as the centre, rather it transforms the notion of spectacle to include the spectators as participants. There is no position outside this event that can subject it to the operations of a disinterested gaze. This is why the peculiar photographic technology of the extreme close-up is so important: it allows us to see the subtle play of emotions flitting across the surface of these faces. There is then, an intimacy in this physical proximity that is typically only harnessed in the photograph when the subject is either not aware of being witnessed or is placed in circumstances of great familiarity with those around her.

Masi’s use of contact sheets aids him in this endeavour allowing him to isolate areas of interest that are cropped then expanded in scale and photographed once more. It would be a mistake to confuse this metonymic register with a more violent process of extracting and isolating the area of visual interest commonly attributed to the mechanical gaze as an annihilation or possession of the subject. In these accounts the image is a fetishistic substitution for the satisfaction of destructive instincts of death and desire in civilised society in which visual pleasure becomes an instrument for the

15 In this case Masi used a Nikon EM, a Nikkor 28 mm lens, and fifteen 36 exposure rolls of Kodak T-Max film. Luigi Di Corato describes his images of the ordinary people at the Palio, as an example of Masi’s identity as an ‘artist-paparazzo’ that casts the Senesi in the role of celebrities as they come briefly under the spotlight: “Power and Glory, a version of the facts” in Power and Glory, with an introduction by Michael Archer, Edizioni Polistampa Firenze, 2001, pp. 11-14.

16 Denis Masi in conversation with the author, 9 August 2004.