‘Material’, published by Steidl Verlag, Germany, 2002; 80pp, 75 colour plates. ISBN 3882437294.
‘Material is what we start with and what we are left with. It is all there is.
Substance is smeared across substance, across the surface of the world, and becomes the world’s new surface, wires are bound, would around other wires, material on material produces the fringed edges of scurf and skimmings, as delicate as circuit board tracings, materials are split and materials are spilt, metal is bruised by heat and metal is coated in a fur of ice, things come together and things come apart, matraila becomes new material.
Here are outstanding objects and objects left outstanding.’
Text by Jeremy Millar on back cover copy.
While working on my series ‘Deep Blue’ for which I visited around 60 very high technology sites around the world in the mid 1990’s, I frequently was asked to don an all enclosing protective suit as indicated in this book’s cover, with only my face exposed.
Far from protecting me, the principle was to mitigate against me introducing particles of dust or dirt into the highly controlled environments where extremely precise manufacturing or experiments were taking place where I was making ‘portraits of machines. As I approached the end of photographing for that project I began to be a little obsessed with the thought of those unwanted particles and decided to start photographing ‘dirt’, famously associated with Mary Douglas’s phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ who used it in her 1966 book ‘ Purity and danger’.
Peter Fraser 2026