[1][10] San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker situated Priola's images "on the border between documentary and conceptual art," where they function as surveys of under-noticed details that "remind us how many potential questions, how much intimate domestic history, may lie embedded on the margins of our attention.

[27][28][29] His tableaux vivants portrayed baroque, operatic scenes—often featuring himself playing various roles, male and female, along with artist friends—that critic Glen Helfand described as "visceral, slightly deranged and frankly homoerotic motifs" appropriated from paintings by Titian, Caravaggio and others.

[24][25][28] Writers have situated Priola's black-and-white work among a generation of post-deconstruction photographers that sought to re-establish faith in the medium's "essential connectedness to its subject," identifying an uncanny, evocative quality that renders recognizable objects enigmatic and open to emotions and narratives—cinematic, therapeutic, evidential—that viewers fabricate for them.

[31][32][33] San Francisco Examiner critic David Bonetti wrote, "Priola is an elegiac poet of the camera, and his pictures explore feelings of nostalgia, emptiness, absence, loss and melancholy … Spurs to memory [his] still life/portraits become touching memento mori.

"[34] Priola's "Paradise" (1993–94) and "Saved" (1995–97) series consisted of small photographs (the former group in a round format) of everyday objects and odd personal mementos—jewel box, old notebook, fragment of lace, broken plastic horse—isolated against depthless black space.

[1] In the "Nurture" series (2014), Priola continued to explore overlooked aspects of domestic architecture, capturing often-uneasy marriages of modest homes and outdoor vegetation, trouble spots—of overgrowth or stark survival, neglect or ambiguous intention—where flora and human intention collide.

[10][39][6] Comparing these works to images of bare grey pine tree trunks illuminated against black, Mark Van Proyen wrote, “therein lies the underlying drama of Priola’s new photographs: They reveal the sharp and subtle juxtaposition of dormant and living forms, echoing the split history of photography understood as one of technically codified verisimilitude and another of elegiac evocation.