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