A photographer has captured retro reggae album covers in front of their real life London locations

London has been the backdrop for countless films and television programs over the years, but the lesser known pop culture locations are those that grace the front of album covers.

In "Covers: Retracing Reggae Record Sleeves in London," Brixton-based photographer Alex Bartsch has plotted the locations of 42 retro reggae album covers photographed in London between 1967 and 1987 and rephotographed them in situ.

He began the project in 2014.

"The idea first came to me when I bought the Brixton Cat LP by Joe's All Stars (Trojan Records, 1969)," Bartsch states on his website.

"I live in Brixton and took the record down to the market where the cover photo was shot, holding it up and rephotographing it at arms length, matching up the LP to the background. The second cover was Smiley Culture's Cockney Translation 12", which was photographed in Battersea. From then on, I was hooked."

He added that some of the images took "months of detective work," including cycling around the city, hitching a boat ride across Regents Canal, climbing on top of an Old Street roof, and asking to enter a stranger's front room in Hampstead.

A Kickstarter campaign running until December 6 to release the photos into a book had already raised £27,472, ahead of the £15,000 goal, at time of publishing this article, and a selection of images were exhibited at Art Basel Miami earlier this month.

"The image on a record cover usually remains within defined borders, instantly recognisable as a record cover, but not so much as a location," Bartsch said in a press release."Approaching the scene from a wider angle and revealing the cover's surroundings brought me, and will hopefully bring others, closer to the time and place of the original photo shoot."

See a selection of images from "Covers" below: