He is the Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and formerly served as Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
He became the founding Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2008 and was named Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2014.
Prodger has devoted much research to the so-called ‘second invention’ of photography, when wet-plate collodion supplanted Daguerreian and paper negative technologies in the 1850s-70s.
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.
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.
He has also written short texts for monographs by Anderson & Low, Katharine Cooper, Harold Feinstein, Sharon Harper, Anna Kuperberg, Yann Mingard, Suzanne Opton, Paul Outerbridge, Anne Rearick, and Joni Sternbach.
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] Martin Parr: Only Human, London: Phaidon, 2019.
ISBN 978-0195149630 Illustrations of Human and Animal Expression from the Collection of Charles Darwin, Lewiston, New York and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.