Writing
Essays, interviews, and critical texts by and about Peter Fraser.
-
Lacuna and Pollock Krasner Series: An Introduction 2026
In 2017, following my exhibition Mathematics at PhotoEspana, Madrid, followed in 2018 at Camden Art Centre, and the launch of the accompanying publication, I began making new work in Finland, Estonia, Slovenia and the UK, experimenting with a new super high resolution camera. This allowed the printing of large prints with significant detail, which, when allied to colour and form, provided key information in the prints otherwise unavailable.
-
The Visionary Lens of Peter Fraser 2024 Mosaic Digest Magazine Interview
In this interview, Peter Fraser discusses his unique approach to photography, his influences, and the evolution of his work over five decades, offering insight into his artistic philosophy and vision.
-
The Arnolfini Works 2022 (1984) Ann Gallagher
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…
-
Lacuna 2020 Pollock Krasner Award extract Peter Fraser
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,…
-
‘Mathematics’ Book Review 2018, 1000 Words, Jeremy Millar
If one wants to take the measure of something, then it is often best to do so from more than one point. More usually these multiple positions occur in space – the same object viewed simultaneously from different places, for…
-
The Things That Count 2018 Amy Sherlock
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…
-
Nothing Has Changed. Everything Has Changed. Stray Thoughts on Mathematics 2018, David Campany
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.…
-
Renewed Two Blue Buckets 2017 Gerry Badger and David Campany
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…
-
‘Two Blue Buckets’ by Peter Fraser; Director’s Cut, by Sean O’Hagen, Guardian 4th April 2017
-
There’s This Green Shed Right? 2017 Gerry Badger
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…
-
Glimmers of Perfection ‘Mathematics’ 2017 Mark Durden
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…
-
A Liberation From the Ordinary 2013 John Burnside
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…
-
Shadow Waltz 2012 Brian Dillon
‘I aspire to the object, to the blessing of matter and opacity.’ –E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
-
The Secret Life of Objects 2012 Diane Smyth
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
-
A City in the Mind 2012 Adam Bell
-
Lost for Words 2010 Mark Durden
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…
-
Oxford University Artist Residency 2008 Peter Fraser
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…
-
Peter Fraser Máquinaś 2008 Exit Magazine, Madrid
-
Peter Fraser, David Chandler 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…
-
Eventually, Everything, Connects 2006 Gerry Badger
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:…
-
Peter Fraser Photographs 2004 Michael Bracewell
“The simple things you see are all complicated.” —Substitute, The Who, 1966.
-
Peter Fraser Material 2004 Rachel Withers
-
An Uncertain Exchange 1993 Jeremy Millar
So disfigured was Barthes, as he lay in the road, that no one present recognised him even though the Collége de France was only feet away. He lay for hours at Salpétriére before being identified. In his final book, published shortly before his death, Barthes leaves us with a tender expression of his ‘realist’ position. Against the ‘futile’ arguments of other commentators, he asserts an existential connection between a photograph and its referent, the overwhelming ‘truth’ that ‘the thing has been there’, of a reality that once existed, although it may no longer do so.