Peter Fraser: Material

by Michael Mack (Editor), Peter Fraser (Photographer)

"Material is what we start with and material is what we are left with. It is all there is." So says Peter Fraser, who uses photography to investigate the physical substance of the world and to question the way in which we perceive our surroundings. Material contains two of his most recent series, in which Fraser evokes the camera's democratic way of looking in order to analyze the different kinds of materials from which the world appears to be constituted. Casting himself in the role of an explorer gathering evidence of another world, Fraser selectively documents the mundane and the extraordinary. Made in the laboratories of an applied physics department, the first series included herein depicts the tools designed to measure the nature of matter, the very exploration of which Fraser is already engaged in with his camera. The second series, and the antithesis of the first, gives form to the everyday mess and grime that permeate our surroundings, the detritus and decrepitude that are the ultimate destination of all organic matter. As the sum of these two bodies of work, Material probes the notion that matter is the primary substance of all living and non-living things.

80 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2002