Peter Fraser is one of the leaders of a generation of British photographers that came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s challenging the orthodoxy of black-and-white documentary photography that dominated the photographic scene of that period. For the series Material, he employed powerful camera lenses to render details such as ice crystals or dust particles with extraordinary clarity. Many of the photographs in the series were made at the Physics and Applied Physics Department at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Fittingly, the subjects are the unidentified apparatus of physics experiments that are used in the study of matter.