Deep Blue.

Photographs by Peter Fraser, introduction by Francis McKee

Viewpoint Photography Gallery, Salford, 1997. 52 pp., 11 color plates, 9½x11¾".

Portraiture has always been used to document the rise to power of a particular social group or class. Fraser’s pictures of machines at the cutting edge of high technology are just such portraits of a species that must now be thought of as highly evolved, with important sociological implications.

Viewpoint Photography Gallery, Ffotogallery, Tullie House Museum and Cambridge Darkroom Gallery.
A healthy fear of machines and robots taking over the world has been part of life since at least the Industrial Revolution, and has a long and celebrated history in fiction and artistic expression. It more recent years, such nerve-wracking paranoias have been the domain of cheeseball Emilio Estevez movies, DARPA conspiracy nuts and Tesla apologists. All the more reason, then, to find a curiously human warmth in Deep Blue, Peter Fraser’s small collection of machine portraits. Shooting an articulating robotic arm against a sumptuous pink backdrop or a boxy communications satellite in front of an aquamarine blue, Fraser manages a formalized portraiture where light and angle conspire uncomfortably with the shape and nature of, say, a main thrust rocket motor, to convey something like personality. A regular particle accelerator magnet is, apparently, welcoming and open whereas a super-conducting high-gradient magnet appears to be somewhat aloof, haughty even. Beneath this somewhat playful posturing of machines is an emotional and philosophical dilemma for the modern age; as computers and powerful mechanized tools become more complex and intuitive and human life grows increasingly rote, is there a border being blurred? Fraser argues that the psychological line was crossed for most of the world when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated Gary Kasparov in a 1997 chess match. Since then, surgical implants, artificial intelligence and robotic aids have progressed almost exponentially. Fraser doesn’t posit any doomsday scenarios, he simply finds a machine that intrigues him, sets up the camera and lets the two devices have a conversation. ZANE FISCHER

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