A City in the Mind

Many years ago, Peter Fraser was captivated by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972). In 2006 he extraordinary novel and, struck anew by its emotional charge, began to photograph his current home London aim of creating an imagined “city in the mind”. Calvino’s book is a fictive exchange between the Tartar Emperor Khan and the explorer Marco Polo, whom Khan commissioned to collect news from across his massive empire late 1200s. Every evening Polo describes a new city from his travels more fabulous and exotic than the philosophising on the myriad creative possibilities of a “city”. (Many believe Calvino’s cities are indeed different interpretations of one and the same place – perhaps Venice.) Fraser recasts Calvino’s notion of an invisible city poetic vision of London that transcends the physical, and can only be experienced in the imagination.