Peter Turner (writer and photographer)

Peter Turner (1947–2005) was a photographer, curator, and writer. He was the longest-serving editor of Creative Camera.

Turner was born in London on 3 February 1947. He studied photography at the Guildford School of Art between 1965 and 1968.

He began working at SLR magazine where he learned the journalist's trade and encountered Creative Camera. In 1969, following the departure of founding editor Bill Jay, Turner became assistant editor to Creative Camera's founder and publisher, Colin Osman. David Brittain, writing in Afterimage Journal, said "Over the next nine years Creative Camera became a pillar of the support structure for photography in the United Kingdom and a byword for good taste". He left Creative Camera in 1978 to set up with his partner, Heather Forbes, the short-lived photographic publisher Travelling Light in 1980 in Putney. Its publications included the first edition of Chris Steele-Perkins' The Teds. In 1986, with Travelling Light in financial difficulties, Turner returned to Creative Camera as editor, welcoming colour photography ("by championing younger documentarists such as Paul Graham, Martin Parr, Paul Seawright, Anna Fox, and emerging transcendental formalists including Peter Fraser") and tolerating the photographic work of "fine artists".

Turner curated photography exhibitions for the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Barbican Art Gallery, London (notably "American Images: Photography 1945-1980" in 1985) and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. He edited a number of photography books and his own photography was exhibited in the Side Gallery in Newcastle.

In 1991, Turner left Creative Camera and Britain, moving with Forbes to New Zealand. He taught at the Wellington School of Design and wrote for The New Zealand Journal of Photography. After suffering from multiple sclerosis, he died in Wellington on 1 August 2005.

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