Peter Fraser est un photographe anglais né à Cardiff en 1953.
Born 1953 Cardiff, Wales, and attended schools in Cardiff, Glamorgan and the Rhondda Valley. He acquired his first camera at the age of 7, and after a false start studying Civil Engineering, at 18, began studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic the following year. He graduated in 1976 after repeating his 3rd year due to major illness while photographing in West Africa.
Fraser lived in Holland and Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, before moving back to Manchester in 1981. He then began working with a Plaubel Makina camera in 1982 which led to an exhibition with William Eggleston at the Anolfini, Bristol in 1984, and a move to that city.
He then worked on several series of photographs, often with support from the Arts Council, leading to a first publication, ‘Two Blue Buckets’, which won the ‘Bill Brandt’ Prize in London (the precursor of the CitiBank International Photography Prize), in 1988.
He moved to London in 1990, subsequently publishing several new bodies of work, including ‘Ice and Water’ 1993, ‘Deep Blue’ 1997, ‘Material’ 2002, and ‘Peter Fraser’ (Nazraeli Press) 2006.
In 2002, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, staged a 20 year survey exhibition of Fraser’s work, and he was short listed for the Citigroup International Photography Prize in 2004. In 2006 he was invited to be an Artist in Residence at Oxford University, England and produced new work for permanent installation in their new Biochemistry building.
In 2009 Fraser was given a major commission by The Ffotogallery, Wales, to return to his country of birth, to make new work for a solo exhibition at the gallery, which opened in March 2010, with a new publication, ‘Lost For Words’.
In 2008 Fraser began working on ‘A City In The Mind’ a new series of photographs in London, which was shown at Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery, London in May 2012 accompanied by a Steidl Publication.
From January to May 2013, Tate St Ives held a retrospective of Fraser’s career, and Tate published a major monograph on the whole of Fraser’s career with a text by David Chandler.
In the illuminating essay he has written to accompany this new work by Peter Fraser, Gerry Badger tells of the mix of feelings he had on first seeing one of Fraser’s photographs. Moving from surprise, bafflement and incomprehension to admiration and pleasure, he experienced the “flame of recognition” when, to quote James Joyce, the “whatness” of a thing is revealed.
Fraser himself has described his pictures of static, seemingly mundane objects as “trying to understand what the world around me is made of.” The results of this quest, which is at once delightfully simple and highly sophisticated, are visually stunning images that, best of all, become more rewarding every time you look at them. Since his work was first exhibited in the early 1980s, Peter Fraser has established...
Simulated alternative realities can take many different forms. They can be found everywhere – in the elaborate utopias and dystopias created in books, magazines and films, in our belief or denial in the existence of an afterlife, in our very dreams and aspirations. We create alternative realities for ourselves each time we imagine the things that might have been, the half-remembered past, events that never happened but we believe to be true. Simulated alternate realities make strange and unfamiliar the things that we thought we knew. Dreamworlds, hopes and fantasies, these alternate realities are created as survival strategies for our daily lives. The simulated alternative realities depicted within this exhibition exploit the problematic dialectic inherent in photography, the fallacy of photogra...