From John Fraser’s Material Witness series
While I am an artist who works within a number of disciplines, my lens-based work is discrete and addresses the world in the most direct way. The formal and material relationships that exist in my photographs are evidence of the accumulated human contact with the built world, contact that has yielded a unique but shared entropic beauty specific to place.
I am in pursuit of subjects that have a timeless clarity and order. With an economy of means, I attempt to produce photographs that possess a formal rigor while being suggestive. I remain skeptical of special effects, and, as a producer of images, I consider my involvement with the camera a meditative act.
My photographs stem from a minimalist aesthetic. They are simultaneously factual records and abstract construction. I attempt to maintain a balance between my conception of a given subject, its image capture, its subsequent process of development, and ultimately its stasis. The reductive compositions that I have found, and arrested, are equally concerned with the problems of photographic vision, and the perception of concrete reality.