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 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.
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