Paul Baker Prindle’s photographs build on the traditions of portraiture, but quickly confound those traditions by using index, vernacular conventions, and the landscape to evoke impressions of the body that go beyond what is visually represented. This work reflects a number of strategies for engaging The Real, identity, memory, and the practice of portrait making from various emotional positions including loss, isolation, trauma, and melancholia.

Inspired by a conceptual tradition extending from Bernd and Hilla Becher and continuing through a generation of photographers educated at University of Wisconsin Madison in the 1980’s including Tom Jones, Alan Luft and J. Shimon and J. Lindemann, Baker Prindle photographs with a variety of medium and large format cameras while mixing chemical and digital darkroom printing technologies. 

Over the past three years, work on his current series, Mementi Mori, has taken him to twenty-three states and the District of Columbia as he documents the haunting sites of homophobic murders. 

Paul Baker Prindle (b. La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA) has exhibited in Austin, Baton Rouge, New York City, San Francisco, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Madison, Wisconsin.  His work has been published by Out and Out.com, Advocate.com, Our Lives, and Männer, and has received mention in Art Forum Diary, Wisconsin Gazette, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  His work is in numerous private collections and is collected by the Wisconsin Union, Museum of Wisconsin Art, and Edgewood College. Baker Prindle is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison.  He works in Beijing, PRC as Visiting Professor of Art at Minzu University and Reno, Nevada where he teaches at University of Nevada, Reno and is Director of Universty Galleries. Paul Baker Prindle lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Reno, Nevada.