London

 

Paul Baldesare

 
photographs

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

The selection of pictures is part of a larger body of work taken in two distinctive areas of London. They were shot on the streets and public areas both of the City of London during the lunchtime period from March 1990 and over ten years later in and around Oxford Street, one of consumerism's great thoroughfares and central arteries of modern London.

The pictures are chanced off-beat moments of street theatre, a continuous shifting pattern of people who were the actors are the city workers, shoppers and street vagrants set against colourful shop window displays and bland fascias of stone, concrete and glass that makes up 'the Square Mile' and Oxford St.

 

Paul Baldesare

Paul Baldesare is a London photographer whose work has been regularly published and exhibited and is in public and private collections. He has carried out several long term documentary projects since 1983 and received an Arts Council National Lottery Grant in 1997-8 to continue his English Carnival project.

He writes:

Each City has its own unique and individual signature its fabric that is the layout of buildings, streets and open spaces defining its own distinctive character.

The centre of London is not lived in the same way as other large cities; most of those who work there daily commute in and out and back to its suburbs. It is generally a daytime city, its business and shopping hours dictating the flow of people. Over the last few years it has also become increasingly themed with well-defined leisure, shopping, business and tourist areas.

I have been trying to define the changing character of modern London by returning to photograph on the streets and public areas that I have been familiar with for over twenty-five years.

To photograph and capture the ebb and flow of the streets can be as frustrating as it is also mind absorbing. An ordinary situation can explode into a dynamic moment at the blink of an eye, revealing a subtle mosaic of urban behaviour that at its best can escape the familiar frame of photographic cliché bringing together elements of visual geometry that can be difficult to label but fascinating to look at.



Paul Baldesare

020 8942 3712|
07952 942 264

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