There is a lot of detail in many of the photographs in this project. A lot to look at, a lot to get lost in. Detail, of course, has always been part of the photographic illusion, part of its sleight of hand. Open the shutter and the camera will receive the light bouncing off whatever is before it. It could be a blank white wall. It could be a million pebbles. A photographer may have considered every little detail before taking the picture, or barely looked at all. That possibility lurks in every camera image. We cannot look at a photograph with the same indifference, the same mathematical rationality with which the camera recorded it. To look at a photograph, any photograph, is to intuit that while it has been made to be seen, ultimately it does not belong to us.

This is an unusual series of photographs. Peter Fraser has shot them in many countries and his motifs could hardly be more varied. Only the theme of mathematics, as the photographer has understood it, could unite them. The exhibition Mathematics was shown at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid in summer 2017 as part of PhotoEspaña 17, and at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2018.