The Big Valley: Eve, 2008. © Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
The Big Valley: Susie and Friends, 2008. © Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Hailing from Los Angeles, Alex Prager is a true photograph-auteur. Her cinematic sensibilities are perfectly at home in the single image, expertly making use of the imagination’s inimitable ability to construct fantastical narratives when provoked. With the eye of a director allowing a tale to unfold, Prager stages each photograph with the precision of a blockbuster Hollywood film.
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Silver Lake Drive, Prager’s mid-career retrospective currently on view at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, through October 14, 2018, traces the artist’s career over the past decade, exploring the ways that her work crosses the worlds of art, fashion, photography to explore and expose fascinating scenes of human melodrama concealed within some of the most mundane moments of life. The exhibition is accompanied by a book of the same name, published by Chronicle in the United States (on sale October 9) and Thames & Hudson in Europe.
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Prager takes us on a masterful romp through scenes that evoke Hollywood luminaries like Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. The exquisite grandeur of Prager’s images belies a haunting anxiety: here beneath the luscious trappings of artifice something sinister lurks. An intangible presence can be felt throughout her work, the all-seeing eye that invites the viewer in as an accomplice.
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