Charges from dressed matter: Construction

There is a widespread belief in particle physics that there is no relativis tic description of a charged particle. This is claimed to be due to persist ent, long range interactions which distort the incoming and outgoing plane waves and generate infrared divergences. In this paper we will show that th is is not the case in QED. We construct locally gauge invariant charged fie lds which do create in and out Fock slates. In a companion paper we demonst rate that the Green's functions of these fields have a good pole structure describing particle propagation. (C) 2000 Academic Press.