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“I love shooting in Los Angeles – it’s like a blank canvas, and the city needs artists. The city needs to be molded. People come here to find their own identity, and they can make the city into whatever they want it to be for themselves.” — Alex Prager
Alex Prager is as closely associated with her home town of Los Angeles as any other artist of her generation, using the city as inspiration, backdrop, and foil for her film and photography works. She was recently given the always-excellent Photographers In Focus treatment from Nowness.
As full of bizarre and delightful scenes, and with references from the opaque to the obvious, as Prager’s own work, this video from Liza Mandelup captures the essences and contradictions of Prager’s work. Prager also recently debuted the world premiere of a new film at Lehmann Maupin, Play the Wind (2019), and an accompanying exhibition.
From Nowness:
Iconic Hollywood style, candid street photography and cinematic staging all form part of the dramaturgy of LA-born photographer Alex Prager’s work. The characters in each constructed scene are frozen by a nebulous mix of fear, love, shock and awe. Prager then uses these unsettling emotional undercurrents to belie the pastel-toned, American Dream aesthetic of her work.
“I’m interested in combining the worlds of the extraordinary and the mundane, then living in the middle of those two places,” says Prager. “When looking at my work are people seeing something fantastical and artificial or real and raw that reflects who they are as a human?”
From the blonde ingénue to the distraught femme fatale, Prager’s faux film still opus reverberates with classic Hitchcock heroines. The award-winning Compulsion (2012) series is set in hyper-real landscapes where women dangle from pylons, cars and buildings. The photographer’s meticulous staging of every technicolor scene enables her to turn tragedy into a spectacle.
