Colin Prior

Colin Prior was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1958. His interest in photography evolved through a fascination of the natural world and a desire to communicate the way he felt about wild places, a journey that began not on dry land but beneath the waves. Having created a portfolio of images in Scotland and the Red Sea, he went on to win ‘best newcomer to underwater photography’ in an international competition and was soon following a career as a professional photographer.

During the early part of his career, he was commissioned by advertising and design agencies for clients in the travel, lifestyle, and leisure sectors which eventually led to a four-year commission for British Airways to produce their corporate calendars with briefs that took him around the world’s many times.

During this time, he roamed the Argentinean pampas with gauchos, Lived amongst the Himba in Namibia’s Kaokoland, spent a week in a bush camp with aboriginal Australians, and documented the life-long relationships between Sri Lanka’s mahouts and their elephants. Inevitably, he had a few scrapes — flying from China to Australia with a fractured skull, having survived a collision with a tree in a Chinese taxi and he spent four weeks in Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains with a herniated disk — neither Of which, he says, he would like to repeat.

Colin’s distinctive and evocative photographs have been published as fine art prints, calendars and books and distributed throughout the world. In 2020, Merrell published Fragile — Birds, Eggs & Habitats, which was followed in 2021 by The Karakoram — Ice Mountain Of Pakistan, the most glaciated region on the planet outside Antarctica and the Arctic. His earlier books, include Living Tribes and The World’s Wild Places, which were published internationally by Constable.