art

Cinematic Storytelling

Alex Prager

TRANSLATING PERSONAL EXPERIENCES INTO HYPERREAL IMAGES, THE RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER IS CELEBRATED THROUGH A MID-CAREER SURVEY AND MONOGRAPH.

Alex Prager (b. 1979) became a photographer overnight. After first picking up a camera at the age of 21, and before any gallerist in the world knew her name, she anonymously hung pictures in the laundry room of her apartment building in Los Angeles. Some of the pieces were stolen by people who had found a sense of connection with the work whilst waiting for the spin cycle to end. It provided an early lesson – the kinds of visual works that inspire, excite and engage people are the types that touch upon a particular moment

in time. The compositions she had staged – choreographed and planned – were taken more frequently than momentary snapshots of passers-by; those that most transfixed viewers were those that were intimate, cryptic and intentional.

Prager’s practice evolved after she came face to face with an image by William Eggleston at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. She notes: “Within a few days, I bought everything I needed to become a professional photographer.” Spending $80 on darkroom equipment from eBay, she unloaded savings on a professional camera – a Mamiya 645, which uses Kodak Portra colour negative film.

In an interview from the monograph Silver Lake Drive – published by Thames & Hudson – Prager recalls the early days, and the first encounters with canonical artworks that have shaped her unique way of thinking. “My mentor gave me this advice: if I wanted to be a professional photographer, then for the first two years I shouldn’t speak to any other practitioners. This way, I would be able to develop my own style, and not just learn about all the rules.”

Self-taught and devoid of formal training, she came to obsess over the fine details of the imagination, spending hour upon hour on the streets, trying to emulate in her own way the small, strange and dramatically potent moments she had discovered in Eggleston’s metropolitan scenes. She continues: “I would photograph until three in the morning and then work in my darkroom until six, so I could immediately process my film. I had to go work at 9am. I came home from work at 6pm and would go back out with my camera.”

As time went on, other influences started to coalesce in her work. She bought books about the New York street-lurkers Diane Arbus and Weegee, spending massive amounts of time reading about their ability to capture strangers at their most expressive, performative and vulnerable. Although unaware of her influences at the time, echoes of Cindy Sherman’s unvarnished understanding of femininity, and Gregory Crewdson’s dark, faux-glamorous take of the American suburbs can also be found within the stretches of her imagination.

The cinematic elements for which Prager is widely celebrated chart back to a childhood spent in Los Angeles. The glamorous exteriors of the city, as well as its seedy underbelly, seep through the aesthetic of her pieces, with subtle references to Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, or the Mulholland Drive strain of David Lynch. In this sense, the early work moved away from the serendipitous, uncontrolled essence of the sort of street photography practised by Eggleston and Arbus, and towards a more staged, controlled and hyperreal aesthetic. In a 2017 interview with Flaunt magazine, she said of the link between street and staged photography: “Whilst practitioners like Eggleston find their perspective in characters already on

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