Ann Gallagher / ‘The Arnolfini Works 1984’ 2022
AG: The 22 photographs in this 1983 series were first shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol. I didn’t see that exhibition in 1984, so the images were mostly new to me until recently, and yet in them I feel that your signature – a very particular approach to observing and capturing a moment – is already evident, and some…
Continue reading ‘Ann Gallagher / ‘The Arnolfini Works 1984’ 2022’Peter Fraser / ‘Lacuna’ Pollock Krasner Foundation Award extract 2020
The ten images presented here form a body of work I have grouped under the title Lacuna. Although I prefer not to talk explicitly about the aesthetic aspects of my photographs, but rather choose to them to stand for themselves, either in isolation or in relation to each other, I would like to sketch out how they came into…
Continue reading ‘Peter Fraser / ‘Lacuna’ Pollock Krasner Foundation Award extract 2020’Amy Sherlock /The Things That Count, Camden Arts Centre 2018
I have a very clear memory, as a youngish child, of watching, one Saturday morning, a television programme about quantum mechanics. I must have been up too early for cartoons and caught the end of one of those shows, broadcast at insomniac hours, which The Open University used to screen on the BBC. The programme described a thought experiment….
Continue reading ‘Amy Sherlock /The Things That Count, Camden Arts Centre 2018’David Campany /Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. Stray thoughts on Peter Fraser’s ‘Mathematics’ 2017
For his latest series of photographs, Peter Fraser has been following the notion that the universe is governed by laws and principles that can be described mathematically. This notion is not new. It preoccupied Lucretius, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and later Galileo. In our own time, as Fraser himself has noted, Max Tegmark, a Professor of Physics at M.I.T. has proposed…
Continue reading ‘David Campany /Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. Stray thoughts on Peter Fraser’s ‘Mathematics’ 2017’David Campany and Peter Fraser /Renewed Two Blue Buckets 2017
David: Peter, many of the British books of colour photography that were published in the 1980s depicted worlds that now seem quite dated (few things date with greater piquancy than the colours of the new consumerism that was redefining British culture back then). The books of that era by Martin Parr, Paul Reas and others are time capsules. This…
Continue reading ‘David Campany and Peter Fraser /Renewed Two Blue Buckets 2017’Gerry Badger /There’s this Green shed right? Two Blue Buckets 2017
Perhaps more than any other visual medium, photography presents a fundamental paradox, a dichotomy between the literal and the poetic. In its purist form, so-called ‘straight’ photography, because it is apparently the least mediated of mediums, it begins with the literal, and for many people, those not wholly in tune with photography’s subtleties, it also ends with the literal….
Continue reading ‘Gerry Badger /There’s this Green shed right? Two Blue Buckets 2017’Mark Durden /Glimmers of Perfection ‘Mathematics’ Skinnerboox 2017
To write about photography involves an act of translation – one comes up again and again when trying to write about photography with the strong sense of an unbridgeable gap between the words we use and the photographs we seek to describe, interpret, appraise, define. Lost for Words, the title for Peter Fraser’s 2010 work in Wales, his place…
Continue reading ‘Mark Durden /Glimmers of Perfection ‘Mathematics’ Skinnerboox 2017’Gerry Badger /Eventually, Everything, Connects ‘Nazraeli Press’ 2006
Because all knowledge is assimilated to the object, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be. The poet must be rhapsodist – his inspiration a sort of bright casualty: his will in it only the surrender of the will to the universal Power. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Everything in…
Continue reading ‘Gerry Badger /Eventually, Everything, Connects ‘Nazraeli Press’ 2006’John Burnside /A Liberation From the Ordinary, Tate Etc, Issue 27, 2013
By John Burnside A Liberation From the Ordinary Peter Fraser at Tate St Ives — a basket of crayons, a colourful conch, a pile of berries, two blue buckets on the floor. Peter Fraser’s photographs of everyday objects, interiors and scenes, many of which will be included in Tate St Ives’s forthcoming exhibition, may look simple enough, but for…
Continue reading ‘John Burnside /A Liberation From the Ordinary, Tate Etc, Issue 27, 2013’Brian Dillon /’Shadow Waltz’ A City in the Mind 2012
‘I aspire to the object, to the blessing of matter and opacity.’ –E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay If this is a city, as the title of Peter Fraser’s new series of photographs tells us, what kind of city might it be? One answer comes from the artist himself, who points in terms of inspiring analogues to…
Continue reading ‘Brian Dillon /’Shadow Waltz’ A City in the Mind 2012’Diane Smyth /The Secret Life of Objects, 2012
Peter Fraser’s A City in the Mind is an enigmatic journey into a vision of London buried within everyday life in the city, finds Diane Smyth At the end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo explains to Emperor Kublai Khan that he cannot draw a route or set a date for landing at New Atlantis, Utopia,…
Continue reading ‘Diane Smyth /The Secret Life of Objects, 2012’Mark Durden / ‘Lost for Words’ Ffotogallery 2010
Lost for words? the question comes as somewhat of a taunt to those who might want to write about Peter Frasers photography. The words address us directly, in the cartoon speech bubble added to a colourful and illusionistic postcard of goldfish, which Fraser has photographed. Another speech bubble bears the Welsh words for the English question: chwilio am eiriau?…
Continue reading ‘Mark Durden / ‘Lost for Words’ Ffotogallery 2010’Johanna Burton / ‘Tiny Jubilations’ Citigroup Photography Prize 2004
Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of the convalescent…Now convalescence is like a return towards childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial. Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of…
Continue reading ‘Johanna Burton / ‘Tiny Jubilations’ Citigroup Photography Prize 2004’Peter Fraser /Oxford University Artists Residency 2008
Crossing the Sahara In the autumn at the age of nineteen, I arrived at Manchester Polytechnic to study photography, having had an unnerving three months previously studying Civil Engineering at Hatfield Polytechnic and discovering that it wasn’t for me. In those liberal times and with a generous student grant, I spent a great deal of time travelling in the…
Continue reading ‘Peter Fraser /Oxford University Artists Residency 2008’David Chandler / ‘Peter Fraser’ Photoworks Magazine, Spring/Summer 2007
Although, oddly, it has no title and the new work it presents is similarly unnamed, Peter Fraser’s sixth book is an emphatic statement in more ways than one. Most immediately, the book – published and beautifully produced by Nazraeli Press – is the artist’s largest to date. Coming in at 360x360mm, it’s the size and weight of the average…
Continue reading ‘David Chandler / ‘Peter Fraser’ Photoworks Magazine, Spring/Summer 2007’Michael Bracewell /’Peter Fraser Photographs 2002-2003′ for Portfolio Magazine no 39, 2004
“The simple things you see are all complicated.” —Substitute, The Who, 1966. The modern landscape is filled with strange configurations of materials:industrial detritus, litter, the ragged ends of technology, machines and cables, gaping wounds in the fabric of construction, their edges sealed with chemical puss. These are the details we seldom notice, but which catch our eye from time…
Continue reading ‘Michael Bracewell /’Peter Fraser Photographs 2002-2003′ for Portfolio Magazine no 39, 2004’Rachel Withers / ‘Peter Fraser Material’ Foam Magazine Issue 5, 2004
Interview With Peter Fraser, Rachel Withers For Foam Magazine, Amsterdam Rachel Withers: This is fantastic stuff, Peter. It’s greyish-white and it looks like it’s solid and slightly springy… Peter Fraser: Which it is. RW: …but at the same time it’s greasy, it’s gloopy! It describes its previous liquid state so vividly. PF: It’s very special! RW: It’s definitely abject!…
Continue reading ‘Rachel Withers / ‘Peter Fraser Material’ Foam Magazine Issue 5, 2004’Peter Fraser /’Máquinas’ (Machines) for EXIT Magazine, Issue 31, 2008
Around 1993 I realized I had not been able to forget a particularly memorable scene from one of the great films made by Stanley Kubrick, namely ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’. In this scene, we see ‘HAL’ the mainframe computer lipreading with it’s ‘eye / lens’, two of the astronauts on the spaceship plotting to subvert HAL’s increasingly controlling behaviour…
Continue reading ‘Peter Fraser /’Máquinas’ (Machines) for EXIT Magazine, Issue 31, 2008’Adam Bell /’A City in the Mind’, Photoeye, New York 2012
Reviewed by Adam Bell A City in the Mind Photographs by Peter Fraser SteidlBG, 2012. Hardbound. 80 pp., 50 color illustrations, 11-1/4×12-1/2″. Photography is one of the most alchemical of the arts. Beginning with the world as it is, photography can transforms even the most mundane details into something beautiful, strange or perplexing. More often than not it can…
Continue reading ‘Adam Bell /’A City in the Mind’, Photoeye, New York 2012’