Peter Fraser (photographer)
| Peter Fraser | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 Cardiff, Wales |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Manchester Polytechnic |
| Known for | Fine art photography |
| Website | www |
Peter Fraser (born 1953) is a British fine art photographer. He was shortlisted for the Citigroup Photography Prize (now known as the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize) in 2004.
Fraser bought his first camera at the age of 7. In 1968, at school, Fraser saw Powers of Ten, a film by Charles and Ray Eames which over nine minutes takes the viewer on a journey from a couple picnicking in Chicago, out to the imagined edge of the Universe and back, continuing on down through the skin to an atomic level. Fraser went to school in Wales until 1971, then studied Civil Engineering for three months at Hatfield Polytechnic, England, before deciding to study photography. He studied Photography at Manchester Polytechnic between 1972 and 1976, repeating his final year due to becoming seriously ill after crossing the Sahara Desert in early 1975.
Fraser has said that 'The idea that there is no hierarchical relationship between large and small, as everything in the Universe is made of small things, has influenced much of his work and came directly from seeing this film'. Fraser was an early adopter of colour photography in the UK, along with Paul Graham and Martin Parr. He began exhibiting colour photographs in 1982. In 1984, Fraser travelled to Memphis, USA to spend two months with William Eggleston, after meeting him at Eggleston's first UK exhibition opening at the Victoria and Albert Museum the previous year. This experience gave Fraser the confidence to commit to working with colour photography with reference to notions of 'Poetic Truth' rather than notions of 'documentary truth' which prevailed at the time. Therefore, despite the historical pressure of the documentary tradition in British photography at this time Fraser was drawn to making photographs which were in each successive series preoccupied with philosophic and metaphysical questions, alluded to by Ian Jeffrey who said:
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