Nick Prideaux approaches the camera as a way of attending to the present. His photographs gather fleeting, fragmented scenes into what he calls a thread of visual notes, and the intimacy they record is his own: light, colour, and the people who happen to share the frame. Working on film, he looks for softness and tactility, and for the delicate stillness that can sit inside an ordinary moment whether it reads clearly or stays undefined.

008 – Nick Prideaux, published by Setanta Books in 2021, is the eighth title in the press’s ongoing collaboration with Open Doors Gallery, a series devoted to emerging photographers. The book runs to 48 pages in a softcover format of roughly 21 by 16 centimetres, with a card wraparound cover. Prideaux is its photographer; the sequence and design carry the work.

The zine format suits the material. Its scale invites close, unhurried looking, and the wraparound cover frames the book as an object handled rather than displayed. Because the series places each photographer in turn, this volume also records a moment of exchange between a young artist and the gallery and publisher who backed the work early.

For a collector, the interest lies less in scale than in sequence and in an emerging photographer’s early articulation of a sensibility. Prideaux’s stated concerns, tactility, stillness, and the present tense of photographed life, are legible throughout the book, making it a considered addition to a shelf of contemporary photographic publishing.