Peter Turner; photog/editor of 'Creative Camera'
Hyfler/Rosner
Published: 09 August 2005
Peter Turner, photographer and editor: born London 3
February 1947; died Wellington, New Zealand 1 August 2005.
Peter Turner was editor of the highly influential British
photographic magazine Creative Camera in the 1970s and
1980s. His editorial direction consolidated Creative
Camera's role as the leader of Britain's "photographic
culture", following the departure of the founding editor,
Bill Jay, who had established its Modernist/Formalist agenda
in the late 1960s. Its influence during this time was so
pervasive amongst "independent" photographers world-wide
that even American photographers - the trendsetters then of
photography as art - read it to see what their American
peers were up to.
Born in London in 1947, Turner studied photography at the
Guildford School of Art, where he participated in the famous
1968 sit-in. He felt constrained by the strictures of
vocational education and this was well illustrated by an
incident with the head of department, the formidable Walter
Nurnberg, who caught Turner lying on a table. "What are you
doing?" Nurnberg enquired. "Thinking," replied the startled
Turner. "You are not here to think, you are here to study
photography!"
On leaving college, he spent a few years as a studio
assistant and freelance photographer, but he had already
been seduced by the radical work of photographers like Bill
Brandt and Tony Ray Jones and by the adventurous images in
Creative Camera, the magazine he was later to edit. As he
wrote later:
The notion of photography as personal expression had been
subverted by the seemingly inseparable marriage of talented
photographers to mass circulation publications whose editors
lacked the insight to properly exploit the vision and
intellect of the people they employed.
He was appointed assistant editor of Creative Camera in the
early 1970s by its eccentric proprietor, Colin Osman, who
subsidised the magazine via his pigeon-racing publications.
Turner took photographs of pigeons for these, subbed copy in
the mornings (as I recall) and spent the afternoons looking
at photographers' portfolios and gave words of advice and
encouragement to aspiring "creative" photographers. His
advice was always carefully considered, gently spoken, well
meant, and useful - a remarkable gift for someone who was
then only in his early twenties.
In 1973 he co-curated with Sue Grayson the exhibition
"Serpentine Photography", one of the first surveys of young
contemporary photographers, held at the Serpentine Gallery
in London. Although Turner continued to make pictures (he
was one of the exhibitors in "Singular Realities", at the
Side Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, curated by his friend and
collaborator Gerry Badger in 1977), his strengths were as an
eloquent advocate of the new "independent" photography as
his written commentaries and critiques attest.
During his editorship, photographic imagery rather than
photographic theory was centre-stage as he thought that too
much critical analysis was "doomed to failure before it
starts". Postmodernism exasperated him and he was ambivalent
about photography's role in conceptual art. William Messer
wrote at the time in US Camera Annual that Turner was one of
"the three key people in photography's developmental
hierarchy in England".
Turner's successor as Creative Camera editor, David
Brittain, wrote in 1999 that this period in the magazine's
history "was the result of a complex meshing of cultural,
economic and market forces with strong personal convictions
(and) not solely the progeny of photographic Modernism" as
persuasively preached by the excessively influential John
Szarkowski, the then curator of photography at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
In 1980 Turner set up, in Putney, Travelling Light, a
photographic publishing business, with his partner, Heather
Forbes, who had worked in the Photographers' Gallery
bookshop in London, and was a talented photographer herself.
But being a hard-nosed businessman was not in Turner's
nature and the business was plagued by financial and
printing problems, although the couple did some memorable
pioneering work in difficult times. In the end it went bust.
So in 1986 he responded to Colin Osman's invitation to
resume his former position at the magazine, which was to be
overseen by a board of trustees rather than by Coo Press.
Colour photography made its belated début in the magazine
around this time and Turner happily championed the emergent
polychromatic talents of photographers like Martin Parr,
Paul Graham, Anna Fox and Peter Fraser. He was not always
pleased, however, with the way that photography had become
the preferred medium of fine artists who were ignorant and
unimpressed by the traditions and history of photography. He
was a photographic purist at heart, but as editor he always
fought against ghettoising the medium and encouraged
contributors to offer challenging and diverse viewpoints to
his own.
With the burgeoning number of photography courses,
academics, events and platforms came debates concerning the
future directions of photographic practice and the seeming
Modernist orthodoxy of Creative Camera and its relevance in
an ever-changing, monetarist world. Turner was asked to
manage the magazine as well as oversee it editorially. The
strain was too much. He was a born editor and proselytiser
who had too much Sixties' rebellious spirit, as well as
nicotine and lager, in his veins to become "a suit". He was
not strong physically either and the years of struggle began
to show.
In 1991 he quit the magazine and Britain, and decamped to
New Zealand, Heather's homeland. There he got back his
enthusiasm and started to lecture at local colleges and
write regularly for The NZ Journal of Photography. Despite
being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he continued to
teach and write with the sort of conviction and humour that
always made something he wrote - even a humble postcard - a
joy to read.
Although he was the author of several books - the best known
being American Images 1945-80 (1985) and The History of
Photography (1987) - and an expatriate for over a decade, he
will always be remembered for the "creative years" of
Creative Camera.
Paul Hill