Peter Fraser has created a portrait of London unlike any other. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities in which the explorer Marco Polo tells the Emperor Kublai Khan of the many fantastical cities he has visited on his travels, Fraser has spent the past five years photographing his current home, London, with the aim of creating an imagined “city in the mind”. In a series of intimate and enigmatic images, Fraser reveals a poetic vision of London which appears to bear little if any relation to the city as we know it. What kind of city has Fraser created? Several photographs feature antiquated miniatures or models, perhaps from some kind of museum. Other images show objects whose visceral texture and colour leaps out from the picture plane –a suggestively fleshy conch shell; shiny chestnuts on a table; the glowing red vellum of a volume of Who’s Who. A dazzling chandelier and a gold chair hint at opulent palaces. Others could relate to learning –a white board is the subject of one image; an antique model of penicillin another. The objects chosen by Fraser could be read as portals to another world, openings onto stories and histories, even other civilizations. And here, as in his previous work, Fraser’s eye is drawn to things and interiors that would not fascinate most as they do him. The London of Fraser’s mind is mysterious and allusive, and reminds us that ultimately all cities are created in the mind. http://www.peterfraser.net/