Tim Frazier is a professor in the Mass Communication Department of Idaho State University. His undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University and his MFA is from the University of Florida. There he studied under Jerry Uelsmann, Evon Streetman and Duane Michals. He taught in Fred Picker’s Zone VI photography workshop for 18 years.

Frazier has work in over two-dozen international collections including the Tampa Museum of Art, the Fuji Corporation Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was selected as an Idaho Living Artist in 1991.

In addition to his fine art work, he sponsors a NASA funded, high altitude balloon project which carries experiments and cameras to altitudes in excess of 90,000 feet. This past summer, Frazier headed a team from ISU who built a science capsule and had it launched into space by NASA. He is also an avid outdoorsman, fisherman and woodworker.

Portraits of A

A suffers from manic depression. This affliction colors her entire existence and threatens to consume her. As a painter, she uses this internal instability as fuel for creating convoluted, tortured and energetic depictions of her world.

In late December 2008 I photographed her as she ripped through a spectrum of states that was painful to witness.
“How do you feel right now?”
“Mad, angry, hate.”
“Show me.”
She lunged at the camera then curled into a ball.
“Let’s move here.” She bolted to the couch.
“Photograph me like this.” She moved in a jerky, animated way. I shot as she moved, seeing only those brief moments between exposures. An odd syncopation developed between her movements and my shooting. Then she sat upright and reached for a cigarette. This session was over. We photographed three times over five days for a total of about eight hours of work. The editing took over four months.

A emailed me in January 2009 saying she had started new meds. Her life was stabilizing and she had a boyfriend. A show of her work opened in April at an art center in Edmonton, Canada. She seemed calm, though complaining of a distance from the things around her. She was more content in her job and settled in her life.

Two weeks before this show débuted, she quit her medication.