Michael Bracewell, 'Peter Fraser photographs 2002-2003'
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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 to time, their probable meanings mute. They have the fascination of exposed organic processes – the innards of the world, its leakages and cauterised cuts.
In Peter Fraser’s recent series of photographs, ‘Materials’, he brings these often hidden or unnoticed features to our particular attention, and, in doing so, performs a transformative gesture upon them through the process of his photography. Vast and glossy, vibrant and hypnotically detailed, his studies of modern matter – the materials, mechanics and substances of the world – represent his subjects on what seems an epic scale. But his purpose in doing so is neither ironic nor mock heroic. The closest relative to his particular form of scrutiny might be forensic science – that here are meticulous studies of some kind of evidence. Bolts encrusted with sweating oil, crocodile clips on a brightly coloured circuitry, ice furred metal. Throughout “Materials” the subjects seem as unctuous as tropical vegetation – it is as though the processes and fabrics of post-industrialism had taken on the qualities of deliquescent flora. Thus the photography of Peter Fraser takes its place in the world as a sensory statement: a presentation of the quietly visceral – touch and colour, surface and edge, gloss and texture all become eloquent through his work. Or, rather, these qualities become amplified in his photography, until the viewer is engulfed in their representation. As such, Fraser is an artist who makes a periodic table of sensations from the stuff that the world is made of. This is best summarised in a communication from Fraser to the writer Jeremy Millar: |
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With each series of photographs I choose a different strategy to approach the same underlying preoccupation, which is, essentially, trying to understand what the world around me is made of through the act of photographing it.
And then there’s always more: when you look, for instance, at one of Fraser’s recent photographs for the Citigroup Photography Prize 2004 – a plastic container, half filled with green liquid, or a polystyrene cup skewered all over with cocktail sticks – you are suddenly caught in the grasp of not simply an imagined sensory experience, but a moment of contemplation. The effect is reminiscent of W.H.Auden’s description of the momentary stupification caused by hot water: “Plunge your hands into the basin, plunge them in up to the wrist. Stare, stare at the mirror, and wonder what you’ve missed.” In other words, Fraser’s photographs seem to halt the mind with their mute questions: whatever narrative they might possess remains unknowable.
There is a quality to the photographs which is so tactile, so in tune with an empathy of touch, that the viewer feels drawn in to the very consciousness of the images. It is an experience which is by turns unsettling, pleasurable and somewhat dream-like. Johanna Burton, routes Fraser’s art through Beaudelaire’s identification of drunkenness, convalesence and childhood as being aspect’s of an artist’s creative state. And this is an astute perception, as it suggests how the world is seen from a somewhat altered state, in which the contours of our responses become rearranged.
In this much, Fraser’s examination of the world appears more an act of wonder than of pathology. His photography achieves a state of extravagant lucidity, the effects of which, in a further double-track of their being, share both the openness to empathy of heightened human perception, and the sheer precision of the coldly scientific. Where the necessary magic seems to enchant Fraser’s photography, is in the almost chemical combination of these two shared states – the mingling of compassionate, heightened human perception and laboratory-determined objectivity. It is rather as though, as you get caught in the mesmeric presence of Fraser’s photography, you are seeing the visual reports of a hugely sophisticated robot, the programmes of which have also the capacity to feel emotion.
Creativity so often abounds in the collision of opposites; as scientific precision abutts human empathy within a work of art, so the work enables what the painter Bridget Riley has identified in the phrase: ‘an artist is a person who has an inner text which they need to translate’. By this token, Fraser’s ‘inner text’ is his questioning of the world around him, and his act of translation is the need to try to understand this world. It would make sense for him to be an artist within the lineage of post-impressionism – in other words, absorbed within the complexities of seeing, then dismantling and reassembling his impressions, the better to express their innermost qualities.
Fraser takes his subject matter from what might be called the ‘ordinary’ world around him. An earlier series of photographs gathered together in the monograph ‘Two Blue Buckets’, in 1988, for instance, included images of a path of dried grass through some scrawny undergrowth, old fashioned weighing scales, a field of docile cows glimpsed through a hedgerow, or limp washing on a line in a snowy garden. In themselves, the subjects could not have seemed more drained of drama or significance; and yet Fraser’s photography identifies the exact point at which objects or scenes (nearly always unpeopled) achieve a kind of heightened eloquence of their own being - an instant of articulation within consciousness which Virginia Woolf describes as a ‘moment of being’.
And yet where Virginia Woolf (or her ‘great adventure’, the writings of Marcel Proust) were concerned with those moments of heightened awareness which served as portals into memory or ‘the stream of consciousness’, the photography of Peter Fraser documents the intensity of the moment of perception itself. As an artist, Fraser enters ‘the stream of consciousness’ - as is described perhaps most clearly in his ‘Triptychs’ series from 1988 - and engages with poetic visual rhetoric. But it is the relationship between the substance of what he sees, and the intensity with which he see it, that remains his prime concern. To push further into the territory of memory or meditation would unbalance the poise of his photography; it seems vital to Frasers’s art, in fact, that he removes the possibility of prompting nostalgia in any form.
Rather, there is a sense of immediacy in Fraser’s vision - a tension between wonder and witness, encounter and reverie, the taut poetry of which appears to articulate the complete philosophical and physical existence of his subjects. Under such scrutiny, the banal becomes exotic, engendering an elevated aesthetic which Fraser’s significant use of colour maintains at the heighest pitch of visual refinement.
In his recent work, Fraser has photographed what might be compared to Shakespeare’s “deeds that no name” - phenomena which seem to be the result of an activity, but what the purpose of that action might have been remains unknown. So here is Fraser’s picture of a clumsily folded paper dart, come to rest in a scattering of broken glass; and here are shards of pre-stressed masonry, as dramatic in their way as geological specimens, and the delicate head of a dandelion caught in what looks like a spillage of sump oil. Everywhere, it seems, is the consequence of nameless activity - the loose ends of conditionality, where the discarded or accidental effects of process are left where they occurred. In one sense, these phenomena might be compared to the doodling in the margins of an exercise book; in another, they are a form of litter. They appear abject, worthless, and in their expendability their substance becomes exposed.
What emerges through Fraser’s examination of the world - his enquiry into the substance of the matter which surrounds him - is the articulation of process: we see both the process of Fraser’s enquiry, and the processes which transform or maintain the substance and content of our modern landscape. And the visual impact of Fraser’s photography appears to derive from the tension between urgency and awe. His amplification of the often unnoticed processes of matter, and his identification of the transformation of the banal into the exotic, has perhaps its analogy to human mortality - “each so deep and so superficial”, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “between the forceps and the stone”.
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There is a quality to the photographs which is so tactile, so in tune with an empathy of touch, that the viewer feels drawn in to the very consciousness of the images. It is an experience which is by turns unsettling, pleasurable and somewhat dream-like. Johanna Burton, routes Fraser’s art through Beaudelaire’s identification of drunkenness, convalesence and childhood as being aspect’s of an artist’s creative state. And this is an astute perception, as it suggests how the world is seen from a somewhat altered state, in which the contours of our responses become rearranged.
In this much, Fraser’s examination of the world appears more an act of wonder than of pathology. His photography achieves a state of extravagant lucidity, the effects of which, in a further double-track of their being, share both the openness to empathy of heightened human perception, and the sheer precision of the coldly scientific. Where the necessary magic seems to enchant Fraser’s photography, is in the almost chemical combination of these two shared states – the mingling of compassionate, heightened human perception and laboratory-determined objectivity. It is rather as though, as you get caught in the mesmeric presence of Fraser’s photography, you are seeing the visual reports of a hugely sophisticated robot, the programmes of which have also the capacity to feel emotion.
Creativity so often abounds in the collision of opposites; as scientific precision abutts human empathy within a work of art, so the work enables what the painter Bridget Riley has identified in the phrase: ‘an artist is a person who has an inner text which they need to translate’. By this token, Fraser’s ‘inner text’ is his questioning of the world around him, and his act of translation is the need to try to understand this world. It would make sense for him to be an artist within the lineage of post-impressionism – in other words, absorbed within the complexities of seeing, then dismantling and reassembling his impressions, the better to express their innermost qualities.
Fraser takes his subject matter from what might be called the ‘ordinary’ world around him. An earlier series of photographs gathered together in the monograph ‘Two Blue Buckets’, in 1988, for instance, included images of a path of dried grass through some scrawny undergrowth, old fashioned weighing scales, a field of docile cows glimpsed through a hedgerow, or limp washing on a line in a snowy garden. In themselves, the subjects could not have seemed more drained of drama or significance; and yet Fraser’s photography identifies the exact point at which objects or scenes (nearly always unpeopled) achieve a kind of heightened eloquence of their own being - an instant of articulation within consciousness which Virginia Woolf describes as a ‘moment of being’.
And yet where Virginia Woolf (or her ‘great adventure’, the writings of Marcel Proust) were concerned with those moments of heightened awareness which served as portals into memory or ‘the stream of consciousness’, the photography of Peter Fraser documents the intensity of the moment of perception itself. As an artist, Fraser enters ‘the stream of consciousness’ - as is described perhaps most clearly in his ‘Triptychs’ series from 1988 - and engages with poetic visual rhetoric. But it is the relationship between the substance of what he sees, and the intensity with which he see it, that remains his prime concern. To push further into the territory of memory or meditation would unbalance the poise of his photography; it seems vital to Frasers’s art, in fact, that he removes the possibility of prompting nostalgia in any form.
Rather, there is a sense of immediacy in Fraser’s vision - a tension between wonder and witness, encounter and reverie, the taut poetry of which appears to articulate the complete philosophical and physical existence of his subjects. Under such scrutiny, the banal becomes exotic, engendering an elevated aesthetic which Fraser’s significant use of colour maintains at the heighest pitch of visual refinement.
In his recent work, Fraser has photographed what might be compared to Shakespeare’s “deeds that no name” - phenomena which seem to be the result of an activity, but what the purpose of that action might have been remains unknown. So here is Fraser’s picture of a clumsily folded paper dart, come to rest in a scattering of broken glass; and here are shards of pre-stressed masonry, as dramatic in their way as geological specimens, and the delicate head of a dandelion caught in what looks like a spillage of sump oil. Everywhere, it seems, is the consequence of nameless activity - the loose ends of conditionality, where the discarded or accidental effects of process are left where they occurred. In one sense, these phenomena might be compared to the doodling in the margins of an exercise book; in another, they are a form of litter. They appear abject, worthless, and in their expendability their substance becomes exposed.
What emerges through Fraser’s examination of the world - his enquiry into the substance of the matter which surrounds him - is the articulation of process: we see both the process of Fraser’s enquiry, and the processes which transform or maintain the substance and content of our modern landscape. And the visual impact of Fraser’s photography appears to derive from the tension between urgency and awe. His amplification of the often unnoticed processes of matter, and his identification of the transformation of the banal into the exotic, has perhaps its analogy to human mortality - “each so deep and so superficial”, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “between the forceps and the stone”.
Source