About

Nicholas Prior delves into the complexities of childhood and depicts scenes that are tranquil in feeling yet psychologically charged. Set against the placid backdrop of small town New England, the images are quietly uncanny, revealing subtle disruptions in the logical order that adults take for granted. The events Prior observes operate according to the very private protocol of childhood. The young subjects are not performing for adults or for the camera, and in both public settings and domestic situations they appear committed to their own interior psychological spaces. The images offer adult viewers an invitation to linger at the edges of a world most of us have lost sight of, one familiar yet not fully accessible, in the end leaving one to search for evocative echoes of significant events from one’s own childhood in these seemingly benign activities.

Nicholas Prior holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he currently teaches. In 2005, he was the recipient of an Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation. His work was included in Presumed Innocent at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA in 2008 as well as the traveling exhibition ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, which opened June 2005 at Musée de l’Elysée, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then went to the gallery of the Aperture Foundation, in New York until June, 2006. In conjunction with the traveling exhibition a major book was published jointly by Thames & Hudson and Aperture.