Words by Andrea Gemmet
You never know where in the world you’ll find Menlo Park photographer Jennifer Fraser, but chances are good that she’ll be packing rain gear. While she loves to capture beautiful scenes on the Peninsula, her annual travels find her training her lens on everything from wild horses and camel trains to sulfurous mountains and underground religious shrines. But there is one pattern to her travels, from Iceland to Ladakh to the Lofoten Islands. “My kids ask why I go to so many wet, rainy places,” she says with a smile. “My grandfather was from the Shetland Islands, so it’s in my blood, I guess.”
Jennifer’s large-scale prints have found fans among local homeowners. There’s not much interest in small prints lately, she observes. People want something large enough to hang in the living room behind their sofa. Her dramatic black-and-white image of Death Valley sand dunes, which was exhibited at Praxis Photo Arts Gallery in Minneapolis, is a perfect example of what fellow photographers refer to as a “couch shot.”
Honing her craft over the years, Jennifer has developed a vocabulary of gestures for communicating with people despite a language barrier. Like most photographers, she uses a digital camera, but in her early years, she learned to develop film in the darkroom that her grandfather built. Patience and preparation are key to her process. On at least one occasion, that meant standing in a swamp with horses running at her, swatting mosquitoes with one hand and holding her camera with the other. “So much of photography involves waiting,” Jennifer says. Usually that means getting up very, very early to capture the light. “You get there in the dark and just hope that the sunrise is nice.”
ABOVE: In Cuba’s capital, Jennifer poked her head into what she thought was an abandoned building. Her first instinct was to warn the boy that the spiral staircase wasn’t safe. Then a couple walked past him on the stairs carrying grocery bags, and she realized that this was just part of daily life for the people who call it home.
ABOVE: “It has beautiful architecture, but half of Havana is falling down,” says Jennifer of her experience in Cuba. Having weathered decades of embargoes, the city’s faded grandeur reveals evocative layers of color and texture.
ABOVE: A pair of surfers walk on Pismo Beach
BELOW: A young monk at Lamayuru Buddhist monastery in northern India demonstrates his yoga pose.
