Rena

Seven photographs of masked soldiers, faces withheld, made twenty years before privacy became the question it is now.

In 2006 Mette Tronvoll was let into Rena leir in Østerdalen, the home base of Norway's special-operations and anti-terror commando, where photography is normally forbidden. The seven works here come from the series she made there. Four larger photographs show the masked soldiers at full length in the winter landscape, and three smaller ones move in close, to the only thing the balaclava leaves visible: the eyes and the mouth. They hover between the heroic image a state makes of its soldiers and something far more private, the person you cannot read behind the mask. Made twenty years ago, they land differently now: in an age of surveillance, social media and shrinking privacy, a series built on faces deliberately withheld keeps finding new ways to speak to the present.