J john priola biography of christopher

American artist and photographer

J. John Priola is a San Francisco-based contemporary visual artist and educator.^[1][2] He is known for photographic series capturing humble, generally inanimate subjects that explore human presence, absence and loss through visual metaphor.^[3][4][5][6] Priola's mature work can be broadly divided into earlier black-and-white, gelatin-silver series—formal elegant, painterly works largely focused on everyday objects and architectural details elevated to portraits^[7][8][9]—and later color series, which gradually shifted from architectural settings to detailed, varied explorations of the often-conflicted human relationship to nature.^[1][10]San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker situated Priola's images "on the border between documentary and conceptual art," where they function as surveys of under-noticed details that "