File Note 120: Peter Fraser

I have a very clear memory, as a youngish child, of watching, one Saturday morning, a television programme about quantum mechanics. I must have been up too early for cartoons and caught the end of one of those shows, broadcast at insomniac hours, which The Open University used to screen on the BBC. The programme described a thought experiment. Imagine you have a pair of gloves. You separate them and put them in boxes. You post one to a friend in London; the other, to a friend in Paris. The friend in Paris opens her box to find the right-hand glove. The friend in London, therefore, has the left-handed glove — whether he opened the box before, after or at the same time as the friend in Paris. Except, the narrator explained, that when the gloves are in their boxes, as yet unseen, either glove could fit either hand — or, more accurately, neither has the quality of ‘handedness’ at all. It is only when one box is opened that you know the shape of the other glove. Somehow, over whatever distance may separate them, these two items are connected and there is something about observing one that determines the other. The gloves represented particles and, the narrator went on to say, a team of scientists somewhere had done a real experiment that proved this theory.

I was a very literal child and I tried to imagine a two-thumbed glove in its box, hermaphrodite, caught somewhere between left and right. (I had not, at that time — and perhaps thankfully — heard about Schrödinger and his famous dead-undead cat.) But I struggled — I still struggle — to get beyond the materiality of the object. Someone, somewhere, had cut the leather for those gloves, had stitched the seams around the fingers, had carefully made one to fit a right hand and the other to fit a left hand: it wasn’t possible that they could shape-shift, just like that. I trusted, absolutely, in the thinginess of things.

Of course, every photograph happens in the imperative tense: it’s an instruction to look — again, more closely, at this. But what are we trying to find here? Where are the ‘mathematics’ the series’ title points us to? Everywhere, says Fraser. Following Galileo: ‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’ Look around you: human, animal, vegetable; stone and sea, snow and air — there is nothing that exists that does not have mathematical expression. (In the physical world, at least; let’s leave aside, for now, the question of the spiritual, of which there is undoubtedly an element in Fraser’s work). Maths can explain why the sunlight passes through the diaphanous crowns of a bunch of tulips, and the length of the shadow one building casts over another in the morning sun, and the repeating, slip-sliding scale pattern on the underbelly of a snake. 

There is something powerful (and comforting) in the idea of a mathematical universe determined by universal laws. This is approaching what Einstein (after Spinoza) understood by God — God who ‘does not play dice’, per his infamous dismissal of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle. (In Einstein’s telling, proved incorrect, the spectral gloves of my childhood are always already left and right: there is no both/neither.) Physicists haven’t yet found the Theory of Everything that would bring together both general relativity and quantum theory, but I don’t think they’ll ever stop looking. In one photograph from the Mathematics series, craning up to see the magnificent cupula of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, every available surface flickers with intricate calligraphy and restless, repeating motifs. Rendered with improbable clarity by Fraser’s high-resolution camera, it’s an overwhelming density of pattern — too much for the human eye to take in; a voluptuous expression of the perfect geometries of the divine.