Martin Prothero

Prothero is a Devon-based photographic artist whose work has hitherto been rooted in his immediate natural environment: with wild animals, capturing fragments of their lives from their footprints; automatic drawings made by trees moving in the wind and rain prints on carbon/glass; a series of pinhole images with naturally occurring holes used as the aperture.

Pandemic confinement induced him to re-examine the work of the great still-life painters of the Dutch Golden Age, which in turn led to the development of what he has termed “slow light photography”. Using long exposures and literally painting his subject matter with the light source during the exposure, he has produced a two ongoing rich bodies of work, Chiaroscuro and Xenia, which pay homage to them while at the same remaining firmly rooted in the contemporary.