David Prifti's work was shown by and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1990s. Since then he has transformed his photographic work twice. First he moved from the quasi-documentary reportage MoMA showed to an obsessive reprinting of black-and-white portraits of family members present and past on sculptural objects such as hubcaps, architectural fragments, and scraps of steel. This was the work for which Prifti was best known in recent years.

Since 2005 he has developed a new process, albeit one popular in the 19th century. Shooting with large-format wet-plate collodion emulsions on glass, Prifti has been making tintype portraits of students, friends, and acquaintances. In a statement, Prifti explains his attraction to these materials. "The fine detail and tonal beauty of the wet plate process allow me to describe my subjects in more powerful ways than I am able to achieve with contemporary materials," he writes.

He has applied this approach to several groups of portrait subjects, including students he teaches at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School and a community of "suspension" people, whose decorations of their bodies with studs and piecings are sometimes the anchors for hanging themselves suspended in the air. In both series, Prifti and his subjects collaborate in sittings of up to two minutes. "That's the place it starts," he says. "There's a certain energy, a certain tension to get at some truth, some moment of psychological complexity."

View artist website