About the Author: John Fraser
About the Photographer (1928 -
Before the War I took a blurred close-up of our tortoise, head on, with the family's box camera. I didn't have a camera of my own. Our camera was a semi-sacred object with which grown-ups took summer mementoes of family and friends smiling into the sun as the picture-taker squinted at a viewfinder the size of a penny stamp.
In 1947 I acquired an ingenious cheap Italian camera. A lever on the side advanced 35mm film vertically from one cassette to another, and the lens could be twisted in and out a little. But there were only twelve exposures, and film, like everything else in England at that time, was scarce. In 1956, when the artist Carol Hoorn and I got married in Minneapolis, I appropriated her 35mm C3Argus, moving on next year to a used Leica.
Minneapolis, where I was doing a Ph.D. in English, was a good place photographically. John Szarkowski was a sort of photographer-laureate of Minnesota. Jerry Liebling and Allen Downs were effectively the university department, Jerry a purist in the Strand tradition, Allen more photojournalistic. Gene Wilcox, also in the Strand tradition, and working at the time as a housepainter, I think, was total, humorous, unpretentious integrity, and died tragically. Al Schumeister was seriously freelancing. Irwin Klein, also in English, was beginning his own tragic brief career, but we never talked photography.
I was able to use the department's darkroom. Casual appraisals, particularly from Gene, were Zen-like in their economy "Sort of grey," "Unh" (sort of approving). But Allen and Jerry used a pic of mine to accompany a NY Times Magazine piece on their film Pow Wow of the university marching band practicing in the rain. And Jerry invited me to accompany him with my Leica on his slaughterhouse shoot, which didn't come off at the time. Carol Geary gave Gene, myself, and the reclusive painter John Beauchamp, a show in her and Mel's apartment, Allen recommended Evans' American Photographs to me. Melvin McCosh showed me Frank's The Americans in his bookstore. An older woman photographer, whose name escapes me, lent me Bernice Abbott's breathtaking Atget Photographe de Paris.
In 1968, the Cambridge Quarterly published my "Atget and the City," reprinted later in Studio International and Pnina Petruck's anthology The Camera Viewed. In The Work of Atget, vol. IV, John Szarkowski said that it "brought a new level of scholarship to the discussion of Atget's work. It would seem that Fraser studied more Atget photographs—in the original or in reproduction—than had any earlier commentator except Abbott (and possibly Reyher)." The Yale Review published my "Photography and the City." Ten of my Throwaways are in the Minneapolis Art Institute.
The rest of the story is in the Afterword. I wasted acres of printing paper, but I'm glad I did it my way, and occasionally I got lucky.
2015
With 50mm lenses and available light, John Fraser took these classic humanist photos in Minneapolis, New York, London, Nova Scotia, Provence, starting in 1957.