Pete Turner grew up in Rochester, New York, where he was already photographing his high school yearbook and newspaper before enrolling at the Rochester Institute of Technology, graduating in 1956 alongside classmates Bruce Davidson and Jerry Uelsmann. After his Army discharge, he joined the Freelance Photographers Guild, and an early assignment following a 43-vehicle Airstream caravan from South Africa to Egypt helped him land work with Esquire, Look, Sports Illustrated, and Holiday, plus Hollywood film work.

Turner became closely aligned with producer Creed Taylor across several labels, most notably CTI, where his rich, intensely saturated color photography, wrapped in glossy lamination, turned CTI's records into coffee-table objects as much as albums. Creed Taylor's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. His images almost always featured wild animals or exotic natural scenes rather than the musicians themselves, a deliberate choice that made the covers pieces of visual art in their own right rather than conventional artist portraits. His comprehensive career retrospective, The Color of Jazz (Rizzoli, 2006), collects his work for CTI and other labels.

Turner was a genuine pioneer of intense color saturation in photography, helping push color photography's acceptance as a fine art form through the 1960s and '70s. He died September 18, 2017, at his home on Long Island, New York.

Turner's photography, exotic subjects rendered in intensely saturated color, gave CTI Records a visual identity as distinctive as its musical one, one third of the label's signature production formula alongside engineer Rudy Van Gelder's sound and Don Sebesky's orchestral arrangements.