The photographs Peter has chosen are from Nico Ferrando's Paper Bag series.

HE WRITES: "The tension between what is real and imagined is an over-familiar modern photographic conceit. Reality, it says, is never as real as you think it is. Most of the time such statements are a warning that what will follow - at least what will be offered for public exhibition - will be over-intellectualized. Mutton dressed as artistic lamb.

Witty is another warning word in the post-modernist canon. Except in this case Nicholas Ferrando makes you laugh out loud. The images he undermines are so familiar. Too familiar, indeed. They require the graffiti-ist's imagination to be re-newed. Make whole again. To remind us what mattered about them in the first place.

"...these images have become over-familiar. Postcards for the fridge door. And in becoming icons they have also become clichés..."

And in some cases how "real" these images are that Ferrando has borrowed is questionable in the first place. Was Capa's controversial falling soldier, which Ferrando recreates, a decisive moment of reportage or, as some have alleged, reconstructed? Then there are Arbus's twins, originally a formal and frightening portrait. Reconstructed by Ferrando they seem even more mysterious.

What is it about these images? The reality is that they have become over-familiar. Postcards for the fridge door. And in becoming icons they have also become clichés, stripped of our curiosity.

Ferrando restores them. His images succeed because we know these trophy photographs - too often discussed - that he is undermining. He strips away the imposed pomposity of over-interpretation.

You laugh because what is so familiar becomes ridiculous. The eye is drawn not to the falling soldier's face or the twins' expressions but to the paper bags which assume a life of their own.

"Everything started with one paper bag," says Ferrando, "trying to cover peoples face in a funny and ironic way. The effect of the paper bag is not to protect the models' identity but to signify to the audience that this is a stage as opposed to real life. The paper bags are more important than the individuals. They are the characters."

The bags, in the end, are like carnival masks. They emphasise what lies beneath. They refamilarise. Make new."