London street photographs that capture dozens of moments in one frame

London Tableaux is an ongoing project by photographer Allan Grainger where he focuses on well-known locations throughout the city to observe and capture people there over a two-hour period.

Via Creative Boom submission. All images courtesy of the artist

Via Creative Boom submission. All images courtesy of the artist

The resulting pictures are recorded moments, layered on top of one another, that creates a representation of each place within a single frame. These tableaux function as a kind of fictional document, showing layers of time, rather than a one-off event.

Grainger explains: "The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote about the ghosts that the imagination meets on every street corner of Paris. The pictures in London Tableaux are traces that reveal the city's identity, and the formed tableau is the result, in part, of the imagination. To quote the photographer Jeff Wall 'One of art's greatest qualities is its presentation of the mystery of identity'. What interests me about this idea is the challenge of demonstrating the mystery of the city's identity in an urban tableau."

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