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Much of Smith’s work is an exploration of different aspects of masculinity and the merging of fantasy and reality, often using multiple self-portraits.

In Artist Rifles he attempts to confront his own reasoning for joining the army. The multiple self-portraits emphasise the effect of the military structure on a person’s identity as it is subsumed into the unit, to become as it were, brothers in arms. The fantasy element draws on drama of childhood games and virtual reality of computer war games. Similar themes of male fantasy are found also in the later series on football ‘Robbie Williams’.

Make My Night is ostensibly a record of a very laddish night out. In each meticulously researched scene he combines multiple self-portraits as the anonymous everyman but this time is more overtly the narrator as well as the protagonist of a frequently observed ritual. With a wry humour he depicts a familiar world governed by group approval and time honoured rites, a world of bravado and sexual tension vies with drunken frivolity and a certain vulnerability to occlude any notion of a new masculinity. He reproduces the variable quality that machine printing of snapshots taken with a standard point and shoot camera generate in the hands of revellers; bleached out faces, over cropped subject matter or the slight blur of the finger over the lens, the hallmarks of an impromptu celebration.

‘This is not pornographic’ is a statement not just a title.The bodily distortions and violent nature of some of the images is deliberately intended to have a rebarbative effect rather than appear erotic. This is probably most evident in the shaving shot; where the cut throat razor evokes the fear of castration and the blended bodies lose all their sexual function. Within other images in this series Paul observes the passivity of a relationship with pornography, that of the supine voyeur. The male figure left masturbating in his chair is seen as the weaker participant in the image.

In ‘Mr Smith’ his self-portraits have a scientific precision that calls to mind nineteenth-century studies of physiognomy. In these intricate studies of celebrity, using existing visual references from popular culture, the artist’s skin becomes elastic, taking on the iconic facial features of the stars. From behind his own skin emerge the faces of some of the most iconic and celebrated men of our time including Elvis, Andy Warhol, David Beckham and Robbie Williams.In the duality of these faces, which are at once celebrity and something/someone else, we begin to realise that what we are encountering is not perhaps that which we initially perceived.

The series ‘Impact’ is a set of photographic images of bullet shrapnel that has derived from criminal activity. The bullets have been gathered by police forensic teams in a variety of ways ranging from being extracted during autopsies or removed from a bulletproof vest after impact. Looking at these images, the viewer is reminded of the broader context of gun crime, not through reports of bloody violence but rather in the textures and details that constitute the individual narratives locked away within these images.