Fermions from photons: Bosonization of QED in 2+1 dimensions

We perform the complete bosonization of 2+1 dimensional QED with one fermionic flavor in the Hamiltonian formalism. The Fermi operators are explicitly constructed in terms of the vector potential and the electric field. We carefully specify the regularization procedure involved in the definition of these operators, and calculate the fermionic bilinears and the energy - momentum tensor. The algebra of bilinears exhibits the Schwinger terms which also appear in perturbation theory. The bosonic Hamiltonian is a local, polynomial functional of $A_i$ and $E_i$, and we check explicitly the Lorentz invariance of the resulting bosonic theory. Our construction is conceptually very similar to Mandelstam's construction in 1+1 dimensions, and is dissimilar from the recent bosonization attempts in 2+1 dimensions, which hinge crucially on the presence of a Chern - Simons term.