Slip Me the Master Key.

Photographs by Thomas Prior. Text by Tobias Wolff.

Loose Joints, 2025. 168 pp., 86 color plates, 9½x12".

Prior’s images of progress, decay and design explore the state of the contemporary world with an eerie clarity.

Slip Me the Master Key, a monograph by Thomas Prior collects together two decades of the American artist’s precise and unflinching photographic practice. Prior's sharp images have a connecting thread of the American uncanny, often looking into the bleeding edge of technology, environment, capitalism, and culture to evoke an anthropocentric vision that's sublime in its consistency and composition. Prior’s detailed style moves fluidly between commissioned and personal work to find a subtle dissonance that captures the tremors of Western life at the edge, speaking in their stillness to hidden dynamics of power, change and control in the 21st Century.

In Slip Me the Master Key, Prior’s photographs operate like quiet alarms where messages lurk just below the surface. His subject matter is dizzying: the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Mexico, a quantum supercomputer, a COVID-era morgue truck inauspiciously parked on a Manhattan street corner, empty vats of Adderall, the deepest snow in the world, microplastics, the blood and sweat of a boxer mid-punch, a cloned dog, a strip of land in the Maldives close to being lost to the rising tide. Gathered together and placed in a careful procession, Slip Me the Master Key reveals the strange beauty and charged stillness of a world tipping sideways.

In many ways, this rising tide is the subject of Prior’s constellation of images; the shifts, gradual yet irreversible, that send the world hurtling into a precarious future. Prior’s oblique approach, cool restraint, and curiosity point toward that future, already in motion. Drawing together both the macro forces shaping our world and the minuscule moments that betray its emotional weight, Slip Me the Master Key offers a chilling yet sublime vision of the Anthropocene in which Prior articulates the unspeakable tensions of the present moment.

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Cat# ZK775S Softbound $76.00 (978-1-912719-68-6)
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