Prodger's primary area of expertise is in prints, drawings, and photographs, especially European and American photography from the nineteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on topics in the history of photography, facial expression, and interactions between photography and other media. Much of his work centers on the rise of photographic vision.
Prodger has devoted much of his research to the so-called 'second invention' of photography, when wet-plate collodion supplanted Daguerreian and paper negative technologies in the 1850s-70s. During this time, it became possible to record things occurring too rapidly to be seen with the naked eye. This is the central theme of three of Prodger's books—Time Stands Still (Oxford, 2003), which analyses the work of Eadweard Muybridge in relation to contemporaneous motion photography; Darwin's Camera (Oxford, 2009), which examines Charles Darwin's interest in recording facial expressions as they occur; and Victorian Giants (National Portrait Gallery, 2018), which connects the drive for instantaneity in pictures with the rise of art photography in Britain. Prodger coined the term 'instantaneous photography movement' to describe the mania for taking photographs of rapidly occurring action in the mid- to late nineteenth century.[4]
Prodger has also written extensively about Modern photography. He is the author of a series, so far including three books (one with Terence Pepper), on Edwardian photographer Emil Otto Hoppé, produced in collaboration with Graham Howe and the E.O. Hoppé Estate in Pasadena, California. He is also an author or co-author of books on Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas, and the partnership between Man Ray and Lee Miller.
In 2018, he was curator and primary author of an exhibition and catalogue on early Chinese photography produced in association with Tsinghua University and the Loewentheil Collection[5]
Publications
Books and catalogues
Illustrations of Human and Animal Expression from the Collection of Charles Darwin, Lewiston, New York and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. ISBN978-0773484672
Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN978-0195149630
Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918, London and New York: Merrell, 2006. ISBN978-1858943312
Hoppé's Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., April 2007. ISBN978-0393065442
Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN978-0195150315
Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from California and Mexico, 1948-55, Portland, Oregon: Nazraeli, 2009. ISBN978-1590052617
The Mind's Eye: Fifty Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann, San Francisco: ModernBook, 2010. ISBN978-0980104455
Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio, and Street, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2011. ISBN978-1855144217
Ernst Haas: Color Correction, Gottingen: Steidl, 2011. ISBN978-3869301365
Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism, New York and London: Merrell Publishers, 2011. ISBN978-1858945576
Ansel Adams: At the Water's Edge, Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2012. ISBN9780875772257
E.O. Hoppé, The German Work 1925–1938, Gottingen: Steidl, 2015. ISBN978-3869309378
William Eggleston Portraits, London: National Portrait Gallery and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. ISBN978-0300222524
Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography. Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Clementina Hawarden, and Oscar Rejlander, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018. ISBN978-1855147065
100 Photographs (editor and introduction), London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018. ISBN978-1855147416
Vision and Reflection: Photographs of 19th Century China from the Loewentheil Collection, Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2018.