In the tableaux vivants genre, photographer Wayne Schoenfeld’s compositions are inspired by the whimsical and bizarre world of the North American circus in the 1930s, its symbolic figures and over-the-top environments. Frozen in time and space, melancholy clowns, animal trainers, acrobatic Amazonian women, dwarves, Siamese twins, fire-eaters and other colourful characters come together in carnival-type settings – witnesses to a bygone era and a fantastical world imprinted in the collective consciousness of North Americans.