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). Intersection for the Arts and New Langton Arts, of tableaux vivants, mixed-media installations and photographic series that explored sexual identity, gender and Jungian concepts of the psyche through lenses such as Renaissance masterworks, religion and domestic roles. His tableaux vivants portrayed baroque, operatic scenes—often featuring himself playing various roles, male and female, along with artist friends—that critic Glen Helfand described as "visceral, slightly deranged and frankly homoerotic motifs" appropriated from paintings by Titian, Caravaggio and others.

Priola's installations consisted of extravagant, moody environments that functioned like theatrical extensions of the images, which he often concealed with draperies, instilling a voyeuristic element. San Francisco Examiner critic David Bonetti wrote, "Priola is an elegiac poet of the camera, and his pictures explore feelings of nostalgia, emptiness, absence, loss and melancholy … Spurs to memory [his] still life/portraits become touching memento mori."

J. John Priola, Nail, gelatin-silver print, framed 40" x 32", 1997. Priola's "Paradise" (1993–94) and "Saved" (1995–97) series consisted of small photographs (the former group in a round format) of everyday objects and odd personal mementos—jewel box, old notebook, fragment of lace, broken plastic horse—isolated against depthless black space.

In subsequent series, Priola turned to architectural details, neglected grave sites and outdoor scenes. Denver Art Museum, George Eastman Museum, Honolulu Museum of Contemporary Art, Kadist Art Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art,

In addition to Anglim/Trimble Gallery, Priola has exhibited at Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco), Schneider Gallery (Chicago), Joseph Bellows Gallery (La Jolla, CA), Weston Gallery (Carmel, CA), and Marc Foxx Gallery (Los Angeles).

Teaching Priola has taught within the International Center of Photography-Bard and Hartford Art School International Limited-Residency master programs and at California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). He was at SFAI from 1996 until its closing in 2022, including service as chair of the photography department and director of the Low Residency MAF Fine Arts Program.