Fresh from a Tate St Ives' retrospective of his thirty-year career, Peter Fraser discussed his choices with Stephen Bull (Photography Course Leader, University for the Creative Arts) in a format that loosely follows Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Best known for photographs examining the strange beauty of everyday found materials, Peter Fraser lives and works in South East London. He was born in Cardiff in 1953 and graduated in photography from Manchester Polytechnic in 1976; emerging alongside other “new British colourists” Martin Parr, Paul Graham and Anna Fox et al. In 1984 Fraser spent some time working in Memphis with William Eggleston.
His first book, Two Blue Buckets, published in 1988 won the Bill Brandt award and is now seen as a handbook for a photographic school that expanded the range of accepted serious photographic subjects. Tate Publishing has just released a monograph of his work containging an essay by former Photoworks Director, David Chandler.
In 2002 The Photographers’ Gallery showed a survey of his work and in 2004 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize (now Deutsche Börse) for work exhibited in 2003 at the first Brighton Photo Biennial. A major commission for Ffotogallery resulted in the 2010 exhibition Lost For Words.
Produced by Ffotogallery, throughout May 2013, the first city-wide Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography was a month long festival of exhibitions, screenings, performances, events and celebrations in both physical and virtual spaces and places.
