An ongoing series of work consisting of black-and-white photographs, each partially obscured by one or more blocks of hand-painted gold leaf. Coley’s photographs have been taken at sites where the public pay respect to God, to art, to national history, and to their own code of ethics. The series is defined by the contradiction between the impartial, documentary mode of gathering source material and the censored nature of the resultant work. The masking of the conventional subject of the image—Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais or Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the particular causes of street demonstrations in locations across the world—contrasts with the legibility of tattoos, T-shirts, street signs, and other incidental information. In each case, part of the image has been screened from view, thereby charging the remaining mise-en-scène with the picture’s content. If homage to a famous statue or endorsement for an ideological principle is being denied, the viewer is asked, to what then do these works pay honour? When René Magritte thwarted the viewer’s cognizance of the subject of a portrait by placing a bunch of flowers or an apple in front of their face (The Great War on Façades and The Son of Man), he was interested in the way humans hide things, especially themselves, from public consumption, whereas Nathan Coley’s The Honour Series (2012) celebrates public performance as a form of collective faith. Despite obscuring the conventionally understood “message” of these works, Coley shows the event itself, the gathering, to be of central significance. Coley has identified the series as being “social” rather than “political” and the “Honour” of the title indicates the nature of work, whose interest lies in the urban environment as an arena for discourse and the citizen as an agent within it. Paradoxically, in blocking the particular ideological content of a demonstrator’s placard, Coley illuminates the substance of their gesture into a universal signifier of liberty and empowerment.