Pete Turner

Who is Pete Turner?

Pete Turner is an American photographer. He is perhaps best known as one of the first masters of color photography. PDN voted him as one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time and in 1981 the American Society of Media Photographers awarded him its Outstanding Achievement in Photography honor.

Noted critic A. D. Coleman described the work of Pete Turner as having "A dramatist's sense of event, intense and saturated coloration, and a distinct if indescribable otherness are omnipresent in Turner's images".

He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1956 along with classmates Bruce Davidson and Jerry Uelsmann.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Paris Foreign Missions Society, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and International Center of Photography in New York. The George Eastman House in Rochester is the depository of Turner’s life’s work and where his retrospective exhibit, “Pete Turner: Empowered by Color”, opened in 2007.

In 1986, Turner published his first monograph, Pete Turner Photographs.