Peter Fraser

Timely new monograph on this important British photographer includes a new interview with the artist by Jem Southam. The book accompanies a major exhibition at Tate, St Ives.

Peter Fraser has been at the forefront of contemporary photography since the early 1980s. Much of his work involves an almost obsessive focus on the stuff of the world, the matter and materials that he finds in the everyday. The objects and situations Fraser chooses to photograph could be read as portals onto another world, openings onto stories and histories, even other civilizations, which he presents as ''found'' still lives -humble subjects, which, through his camera lens reveal something more universal and profound. Born in Cardiff in 1953, Fraser graduated in photography from Manchester Polytechnic University in 1976. In 1982 Fraser began working with a Plaubel Makina camera, which led to an exhibition with William Eggleston at the Arnolfini, Bristol, in 1984. Fraser''s previous books include Two Blue Buckets(1988), Deep Blue(1997), and Lost for Words(2010). In 2002 the Photographers'' gallery, London, staged a twenty-year survey of Fraser''s work, and in 2004 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize. This full colour illustrated monograph considers the whole of Fraser''s career to date, and features an extended essay by writer and David Chandler, Professor of Photography at Plymouth University.