How do you turn a pool of liquid metal into a mirror for your own face? Masats answers by leaning over a square well of mercury and letting the poisonous, mirror-bright metal stand in for a lens. What comes back is not a face at all but a silhouette, a dark head and shoulders dissolving into rippled brightness, the whole reflection trembling as if the sitter might sink into it. It is a self-portrait that keeps its author beautifully anonymous.
There is real theatre in the choice. Almadén was Spain’s great mercury mine, and to photograph yourself in the very substance that poisoned generations of miners is to stage your own vanishing act with a wink. The surface behaves like molten mirror, catching flares of light along its ripples, scattering flecks of dust across the reflection like grain made visible. Masats, who could have shot a straight portrait, instead performs a disappearance, glamorous and grave at once, and signs it without showing his face.
Masats belonged to the AFAL generation that pulled Spanish photography into the modern world, and he was later crowned with the Premio Nacional de Fotografía, yet this image feels like a private joke told in the dark. The print is a unique vintage gelatin silver, made by Masats himself, which matters here: the hand that arranged the reflection also brushed the developer across the paper, coaxing those liquid whites and bottomless blacks. It is, in every sense, a self-portrait, image and object shaped by the same pair of hands.
How do you turn a pool of liquid metal into a mirror for your own face? Masats answers by leaning over a square well of mercury and letting the poisonous, mirror-bright metal stand in for a lens. What comes back is not a face at all but a silhouette, a dark head and shoulders dissolving into rippled brightness, the whole reflection trembling as if the sitter might sink into it. It is a self-portrait that keeps its author beautifully anonymous.
There is real theatre in the choice. Almadén was Spain’s great mercury mine, and to photograph yourself in the very substance that poisoned generations of miners is to stage your own vanishing act with a wink. The surface behaves like molten mirror, catching flares of light along its ripples, scattering flecks of dust across the reflection like grain made visible. Masats, who could have shot a straight portrait, instead performs a disappearance, glamorous and grave at once, and signs it without showing his face.
Masats belonged to the AFAL generation that pulled Spanish photography into the modern world, and he was later crowned with the Premio Nacional de Fotografía, yet this image feels like a private joke told in the dark. The print is a unique vintage gelatin silver, made by Masats himself, which matters here: the hand that arranged the reflection also brushed the developer across the paper, coaxing those liquid whites and bottomless blacks. It is, in every sense, a self-portrait, image and object shaped by the same pair of hands.