The English have historically held the Celts beyond their borders in less than high regard, portraying them as superstitious wife-beating drunks or worse. The Scots, Welsh and Irish on the other hand view their former overlords with a mild sense of sorrow at their inability to share in the Celtic pride in land, kin and belonging.
      Like those other ancient nations, the Scottish psyche is a blend of practicality with mysticism, riven through with the bardic tradition of storytelling, of heroes, and saints, and madmen. Ewan Fraser’s photography is as Celtic as that tradition, even though he has been exiled among the Sassenachs since studying photography at the Royal College of Art in London during the 1980s. And to further reinforce his Scottishness, Fraser almost took up the other national vocation, nearly becoming an engineer in his younger days.
      “‘Rebuilding Britain,’” Fraser recalls, “That was from the Harold Wilson years, when we were supposed to be making a new country. I’m glad I quit after a year! I’d always been artistic, winning prizes at school, for drawing, and calligraphy, and handwriting.” So instead of stoking the fires of the white heat of technological revolution that Wilson and his ministers were touting in the ’60s, that mysteriously fizzled out the next decade, Fraser took the art school route into photography.
      The acclaim Fraser found with his RCA graduation show continued until the art market crash of the late ’80s, “when the Mayfair galleries went down like lemmings, committing mass suicide,” he avers, caused him to adopt another philosophy.
      “I’ve learned to play the long game, to avoid worrying that success hasn’t come overnight. If you satisfy yourself, then there’ll be people out there who will know what you’re about,” says Fraser. “My life is my work as well, and they can’t be separated. There’s a strong sense of time, and timelessness, and graceful ageing.”
      Fraser cultivates his sensitivity to an eternal beauty with human flaws by long soujourns in Greece, and Italy, where he photographs surfaces to be later incorporated into multi-layered images. He fuses Mediterranean mythology with Celtic mysticism, the poignance of the petrified volcanic vicitims of Pompeii with the fleeting loveliness of a modern woman’s glance to create his haunting photographs, that have found a growing audience in Japan, the Pacific rim, and Australia.
      Fraser sums up his life’s work. “I’ve learned this way of measuring my work’s success—if it brings me pleasure, then I know I’ve won.”