Loose Joints proudly presents 'Slip Me the Master Key', a monograph by Thomas Prior compiling two decades of his precise and unflinching photographic work.
Prior’s images carry a distinct thread of the American uncanny, exploring the edges of technology, environment, capitalism, and culture to create an anthropocentric vision that is both consistent and sublime in composition. Moving seamlessly between commissioned and personal projects, Prior finds subtle dissonances that capture the tremors of contemporary Western life, revealing hidden dynamics of power, change, and control.
In 'Slip Me the Master Key', Prior’s photographs act as quiet alarms, with meaning lurking just beneath the surface. His subjects range from the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Mexico and a quantum supercomputer, to a COVID-era morgue truck in Manhattan, empty vats of Adderall, the deepest snow on Earth, microplastics, a boxer mid-punch, a cloned dog, and a strip of Maldivian land threatened by rising seas. Arranged in careful sequence, the images reveal the strange beauty and charged stillness of a world tipping sideways.
The collection reflects gradual but irreversible shifts shaping our world, pointing toward a precarious future already in motion. With cool restraint and oblique curiosity, Prior bridges the macro forces shaping society and the minute moments that carry emotional weight, offering a chilling yet sublime vision of the Anthropocene and the unspeakable tensions of our time.
Thomas Prior (b. 1979, USA) is a photographer whose work blends documentary sensibility with a narrative depth that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Prior is based in New York and works for clients including NASA, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. His previous book with Loose Joints, Amen Break, was published in 2020, and in 2016 he released the book Bomba.
Thomas Prior 'Slip Me the Master Key' (Loose Joints)
245 × 302 mm, 168 pages, 86 colour plates
Exposed spine softcover with raw debossed cloth jacket
Text by Tobias Wolf
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon
Design: Loose Joints Studio
ISBN 978-1-912719-68
Loose Joints is an award-winning independent publishing house based between Marseille and London, founded by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. Loose Joints collaborates with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form : "We circulate new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse. Our holistic approach to publishing allows us to work in close collaboration with artists from start to finish, with all design, editing and production done in-house. Loose Joints also operates independently as a design studio, working across publishing and the arts. Loose Joints is currently based in Marseille, where it also runs Ensemble, a bookshop and gallery dedicated to contemporary photography"