LONDON.- This summer, Camden Arts Centre is presenting the first UK exhibition of Mathematics, the most recent series of photographs by British artist Peter Fraser.

Emerging alongside peers such as Martin Parr and Paul Graham, Peter Fraser has been at the forefront of pioneering colour photography as fine art since the early 1980s. Mentored by William Eggleston, he sought to shift the parameters of photography, influencing a generation of artists, including former pupil Wolfgang Tillmans.

With an almost obsessive focus on the ‘stuff’ of the world, Fraser is concerned with the matter that comprises our everyday. After constructing a conceptual framework through which to respond to found images and situations, he treats panoramic landscape and the smallest details with the same intense attention, revealing the incidental beauty and strangeness of our surroundings.

Drawing from the philosophical enquiries of Lucretius, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Galileo and more recently the Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark, Fraser brings together a series of photographs of seemingly disparate and unrelated objects and encounters – including still lifes, landscapes and portraiture – to reflect on the idea that time, space, and everything within it, can be described mathematically.

Shot in numerous locations and countries, behind each image captured is Fraser’s consideration that: “the atomic structure of materials, and the influence of DNA on the appearance of people and all other living organisms, rely on the language of mathematics for their expression.”

Fraser believes that our interest in, and use of mathematics always has a moral dimension. Interjecting the series are enigmatic portraits: individuals contemplating their personal understanding of the world. Through the juxtaposition of the various photographs and Fraser’s almost analytical focus, he alludes to the underlying patterns and forces which shape the world and our perception of it, as well as the systems of belief through which we try to understand and describe it. In this way, his work might be seen to expose the spectacular and interconnected nature of everything that surrounds us, from the sublime to the mundane.

Peter Fraser (b. 1953, Cardiff, UK) 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. In that year Fraser went on to spend time living and working with Eggleston in the States. Recent solo shows include The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2002); Brancolini Grimaldi, London (2012); Tate St Ives (2013); Real Jardin de Botanico, Madrid (2017). In 2004, he was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize.