Shopping Plaza 1, 2015. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Applause, 2016. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Everyday life is filled with fleeting moments of grandeur, when the mundane suddenly becomes majestic and you feel the overwhelming glory of being alive. American photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager understands this perfectly. “I can see drama in everything, the comedy and the tragedy, even where there is none,” Prager reveals. “My interest is with the emotional and psychological components in a frame. The technical, the narrative, and the process – all of that is secondary to the mood. This is what makes art timeless for me.”
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The Los-Angeles based artist got her start after seeing a William Eggleston exhibition at the turn of the millennium. “When I first discovered photography I looked at the great street photographers and tried to make pictures like them,” Prager explains. “I’m still obsessed with street photography and it finds its way into everything I make.”
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But Prager strayed from the documentary path, preferring to create staged photographs that embrace the cinematic elements of the medium. Imbuing each image with a theatricality that is at once visceral and spiritual, Prager finds the balance between fiction and fact by grounding her practice in truth.
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This winter, Prager will be showing a selection of her signature photographs and films, along with her first exhibited sculpture at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong. Here, we speak about the influence of life in Los Angeles, the freedom of the staged photograph, the porous boundary between reality and imagination, and magic of playing with perception.
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Hawkins Street, 2017. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.