Thomas Prior’s photography captures the uncanny fragility of American life

US photographer Thomas Prior rarely deals in spectacle. Instead, his photographs circle the edges of things, attentive to atmospheres rather than events. His new book, Slip Me the Master Key, published by Loose Joints, gathers two decades of such images into what he calls ‘quiet alarms’ – photographs that hum with unease, registering the uncanny in the ordinary.

The unease is not incidental. Prior’s subject is the Anthropocene, the term coined by scientists to describe a proposed new geological epoch in which human activity – burning fossil fuels, reshaping landscapes, driving mass extinctions – has become the dominant force shaping the planet. Once confined to academic debate, the word now reverberates through art, literature and photography as a way of grappling with life under conditions of profound human-made change.

How, though, do you photograph the Anthropocene without resorting to apocalypse? For Prior, the answer lies in restraint. ‘I see photography as an early warning signal,’ he tells me. ‘Though the larger question is whether anyone truly cares to look or listen.’ Where conventional news imagery thrives on urgency, he lingers on the aftershocks: a sterile consultation room, a roadside drenched in unnatural light, a landscape gnawed at by extraction.

In Facelift Consultation, Manhattan (2022), a woman’s face is mapped with surgical lines, a minor scene made unsettling by what it implies about control, vulnerability and the body as commodity. It is, on the surface, an image of routine medical preparation, but Prior’s framing sharpens it into something else: a portrait of a culture that treats flesh as raw material, open to correction, enhancement, even reinvention. Read within the book’s broader context, it becomes another Anthropocene marker – a reminder that the urge to reshape the world also extends inward, to the reshaping of the self.

That sense of the uncanny, the ordinary tipped off balance, runs through the book. ‘I believe the uncanny is simply the feeling I have when I’m looking for subjects to photograph, which is then hopefully transmitted to the viewer,’ Prior says. The subjects vary wildly, but the tone is consistent: subdued, oblique, quietly charged. His pictures speak less to what has happened than to what it feels like to live in a world where the ground itself seems to be shifting.

The American work carries particular weight. ‘I find the American uncanny to be particularly tragic because there’s a sense that we have the tools to do better, but we don’t,’ he reflects. His vision of his home country recalls the work of William Eggleston or Alec Soth, photographers who illuminated the ordinary, but it tilts darker – more alive to menace. In Morgue Truck (7th Ave), New York City (2020), a stark pandemic image, the dread is not just in the subject but in its atmosphere: a society faltering in plain sight, its fragility exposed.

Yet Slip Me the Master Key is not simply a portrait of America. Its reach is broader, moving between human and planetary scales: Adderall shortages and boxing sweat alongside glaciers and garbage patches. ‘The monumental subjects are just as informed by our actions, flaws, and desires as the smaller, more intimate ones,’ he insists. ‘They are all part of the same human-shaped world.’ In Receding Glacier, Torres de Paine (2014), the retreat of ice is captured with quiet clarity, an image that reads as slow erosion rather than spectacular collapse. Seen against something as close-range as Blood and Sweat, New York City (2023), where a boxer’s exertion is frozen mid-motion, it underscores Prior’s point: that the Anthropocene is not just about distant landscapes but also about the physical strain, the exhaustion and fragility written into everyday lives. The crisis, in his sequencing, exists everywhere at once – planetary in scope, personal in effect.

Restraint is what gives these images their charge. Prior resists the pull of drama, offering instead fragments, oblique details, quiet moments. It’s a sensibility closer to Paul Graham or Vanessa Winship, photographers who prefer atmosphere to grand gesture. Sequenced carefully with Loose Joints, the photographs bleed into one another, accumulating into what Prior describes as ‘a careful procession.’ The approach recalls Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, with its constellations designed to spark associations across time. Here, too, meaning arises not from individual images but from the mood they generate together.

The book ends, tellingly, not with spectacle but with a phrase. They is, they is, they is (2018) borrows its title from Tobias Wolff’s story ‘Bullet in the Brain’, printed at the book’s opening. ‘It’s an acknowledgment of the beauty that can be found in the wrongness of something,’ Prior says. ‘It was important for me that the book not end on a note of complete hopelessness.’ In Wolff’s story, a man at gunpoint recalls not the defining events of his life but a small, grammatically wrong phrase from childhood. Prior’s use of it is both tender and defiant: a reminder that even in fractured times, it is often the overlooked, imperfect details that resonate most deeply.

That, finally, is what Slip Me the Master Key offers: not a survey of disasters but a register of moods. A way of sensing how the present feels – uncanny, unstable, strangely beautiful. Prior’s ‘quiet alarms’ do not clamour for attention, but once heard, they are impossible to ignore.

Slip Me the Master Key is published by Loose Joints, £52, loosejoints.biz