Peter Funch’s series Babel Tales (2006-10) makes for an impressive record of urban psychic space. Each work in the suite involves the shooting of hundreds of separate colour digital photos that are then edited into panoramic street scenes filled with people. Shot in Manhattan, the photos read like captured documentary moments where the subjects come together sharing the same sidewalks and daylight. The uncanny seamlessness of the images belies their careful, calculated construction.

Funch’s crowds are thematic crowds. For all the differences in features, gender, ages and attire, we see citizens that have a sometimes comic, sometimes unnerving unanimity. The groups walk, smoke, raise their heads, take pictures in Times Square, yawn, carry manila envelopes, talk on mobile phones, or favour red clothes. In other pictures, they knit their brows in suspicion, touch their foreheads in remorse, shut their eyes in recall, or walk busy streets in splendid isolation. This tension between competing realms — between public and private, individual and group — makes the series a double-edged blend of anthropology and allegory.

From the series, we learn that the city houses codes of behaviour and that people act them out. While diversity flowers in the faces we see and the fashions the people wear, it nonetheless also shares a seat with the mechanics of repetition. Funch’s cinematic, wide-view format lends New York street life an epic dimension – the images are monuments to the facts of shared space, time and action. In the stark contrast and black shadows of the pictures, we feel its burden on a wider process of constructed identity. The open, spontaneous America of one’s imagination now moves in a virtual, scripted space.

With Tryptychs (2012) Funch shifts his approach. He presents not constructed but rather deconstructed, camera moments. Whether it is hommage à Robert des ruines College Station, the Life’s a Beach trio or And then we celebrated it, he gives us discrete but related images that share a loose, but disjointed, horizon line. The gaps between the images negotiate reframings and reorientations that create extrapolated subjective moments related to a sense of failure or difficulty. In College Station a building explodes in demolition. With Life’s a Beach, a windstorm presages a sunset scene where silhouetted figures raise their arms in a pagan-like salute to the sinking sun. In And then we celebrated it, fireworks shoot from a house in a foggy suburban landscape. The mood in all of them is, for the most part, elegiac. The separate images work like re-visitations or testaments to the theme. If life is a beach it’s a hardscrabble beach, a post-apocalyptic beach, a beach at the end of the road.

As for locale, this is no longer America. The image settings reference anywhere that a Modern past arrives at to meet an uncertain future. If the series wanted a prefix, Western Tryptychs would do. Funch and his history-laden format deliver a visceral sense of the unsteadiness now pervasive to the culture.