Thomas Prior: Looking for Meaning
Slip Me the Master Key, photographer Thomas Prior’s new monograph, delivers an uncanny view of the contradictory world we inhabit.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Thomas Prior.
Gathering two decades of commissioned and personal work, the book spans a wide range of scenes and details from around the world. What connects them is the pervasive presence of technology, power, capitalism, and the effects of climate change in the Anthropocene. The sequence opens with a simple glass of water on a desk, ice melting inside. The caption reads: “The Cleanest Water in NYC (ArcisArtStorage), New York City, 2019.”
Thomas Prior’s photographs are free from unnecessary detail. Light is often beautiful, but always functional. At the core of this restrained visual language, where meaning emerges from the subjects he chooses rather than from an explicit point of view, lies a search for orientation within an anthropocentric world. The tension driving the work is between the strive for control, mirrored in his meticulous, perfectionist approach, and the fundamental unpredictability that governs our world, a force that remains beyond human reach.
A recurring theme of the book is the reflection on our need for interconnectedness: within the human species and with nature, space, and the supernatural. Slip Me the Master Key is the work of a photographer attempting to read a puzzling world through images, searching for meaning while offering his open questions to the viewer.
Slip Me the Master Key is published by Loose Joints and available at the price of 57 Euro.
