J. John Priola

J. John Priola is a San Francisco-based contemporary visual artist and educator. He is known for photographic series capturing humble, generally inanimate subjects that explore human presence, absence and loss through visual metaphor. 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—and later color series, which gradually shifted from architectural settings to detailed, varied explorations of the often-conflicted human relationship to nature. 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 "remind us how many potential questions, how much intimate domestic history, may lie embedded on the margins of our attention."

Priola's work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. He has exhibited at museums including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, George Eastman Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, and at Gallery Paule Anglim, now Anglim/Trimble Gallery, in San Francisco. Priola has published two books, Once Removed (1998) and Natural Light (2022).