Glimmers of Perfection

To write about photography involves an act of translation – one comes up again and again when trying to write about photography with the strong sense of an unbridgeable gap between the words we use and the photographs we seek to describe, interpret, appraise, define. Lost for Words, the title for Peter Fraser’s 2010 work in Wales, his place of birth, made clear his concern with an inability to communicate something. Being lost for words is an expression that aptly describes a situation of shock before an unexpected situation, the bad news of losing jobs and livelihoods or the death of someone close. The title resonated with the political consciousness underlining this work, with its pictures taken in ordinary homes, museums and stately homes that were redolent of class divisions as well as a loss of a certain way of life with the recurrence of things being preserved in the form of lifelike but clearly fake models: loaves of bread made of foam, for example. Words often fail us before Fraser’s pictures. His latest photography, Mathematics, is no exception.