Redeye in collaboration with Manchester Art Gallery is very pleased to welcome Peter Fraser for the last of three Thursday evening talks, running alongside the current photographic exhibition, Focal Points.

"I've spent years photographing objects close up, as I think small things are really important, not least because everything in the universe is made up of matter so small we can't see it with the naked eye. I almost never interfere with my subjects: there are mysterious forces at work in the world and they know, better than I do, how things should be placed. At the time, I'd been obsessed with a thought: that practically everything on Earth looks the way it does because, at some point, a human brain directed a hand to change the shape and nature of materials." - Peter Fraser, on his Nazraeli series

"Fraser seems to be testing Hazlitt's famous contention that 'all things by their nature are equally fit subjects for poetry'" - Gerry Badger

Peter Fraser was born in Cardiff 1953 and studied at Manchester Polytechnic overlapping with Martin Parr, Brian Griffin, Daniel Meadows and Charlie Meecham. Influenced by William Eggleston, Fraser met Eggleston at an opening in London in 1983, and arranged to spend time with him in the US. His first book, Two Blue Buckets, published in 1988, was met with both praise and bewilderment but can now be seen as a handbook for a school of photography that sought to expand the range of what's considered serious photographic subject matter.

Since then he's been widely published and exhibited, with a 20-year overview at The Photographers' Gallery in 2002; more recently in 2009 Fraser was commissioned to work across Wales for a year in a commission for Ffotogallery, Lost for Words, in which Mark Durden wrote:

"There is a dark strain running through many of Fraser's new pictures. The sensuousness, beauty and idealism in his photography of objects is countered by a sense of the impermanence, incomprehensibility and meaninglessness of things. Objects exist not so much for us but against us, obdurate, enigmatic and other."

His work will next be seen at a retrospective at Tate St Ives in January to May 2013.

Ticket prices as follows:
Standard: £8
Concession (student or unwaged) £6
Redeye member £4

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