Pelle Cass has put a new spin on people-watching and taken street photography to another level with his project Selected People. For each photo in the series, he essentially crushes time-lapse photography into a single frame.

To achieve this, Cass sets his camera on a tripod somewhere in a public space around the Boston area (where he lives) and takes anywhere from 100-300 pictures from the exact same spot. Back in his studio he combs through the photos and decides which people, or animals, he likes. Those people or animals are then photoshopped into one frame, creating a collage of sorts.

"I'm definitely working in the street photography genre, but I'm doing it in a different way," he says.

Sometimes Cass knows what he wants before he sets up his camera. When he decided to create a rainbow he photographed people wearing red as they passed through the left side of the frame, people in green as they passed through the middle, and so forth. Anyone wearing the wrong colors was removed.

For other photos he just picks a visual spot then figures out his pattern in post-production. Sifting through his take from a set of stairs he realized he had a number people of with their shoes just inches off the ground and liked that moment, so he photoshopped them together. Where street photography examines a single, irreproducible moment, Cass is examining the aggregate of many moments.

"When I'm looking through hundreds of pictures I'm definitely looking for visual rhythms," he says. "That's not special to me. Photographers look for that rhythm all the time. But I can control it a bit more."

Some photos are harder to read than others. One photo just looks like two groups of people standing on opposite sides of the street waiting to cross. But if you look closely, it's all men on one side and all women on the other. Other photos are immediately discernible, like the one where Cass organizes street crosses into nice, parallel lines.

Cass likes that the photos deal with the notion of time because they squeeze an hour into a moment. But he says he's not trying to make some sort of large philosophical statement or run a science experiment. Instead, he says the project is more about the power of photography to help us see things a little differently.

"Above all, my work shows a surprising world that is only visible with a camera," he says.

Photos: Pelle Cass

Images from Selected People are currently on display at The Fence at Photoville