Paul Baldesare: The English Summer Carnival Event

Every imaginable figure can appear in the thousands of communities' carnivals that happen throughout the year in England. Real eccentrics parade in costumes that can have taken weeks of painstaking work or else be something hastily assembled from boxes and Cellotape. But is there something else going on behind the surface of these cowboys, carnival queens and Disney characters? Over the past seven years Paul Baldesare has documented these events and caught the participants in images that address the line between fantasy and reality.

Paul Baldesare worked as a staff photographer for a London Advertising company before becoming a freelance photographer in 1984. He has a wide experience of commercial and editorial photography from large blue chip companies to a wide variety of magazines and book publishers in the field of education and social welfare. In between commercial assignments he has carried out several social documentary projects. Work from which is included in the collections of the Bibliothque Nationale Paris and the archive collection of the Museum of London.