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.
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.
How many artists can tell such a story, and claim such a moment of singular inspiration and organic, discovery-led approaches? But, then again, how many can point to a career as successful as that of Prager, who is about to have a mid-career survey at The Photographers’ Gallery, London – a four-month-long solo exhibition spanning two floors of the Soho gallery. The exhibition, which shares the title Silver Lake Drive with the monograph, has been years in the making, and encompasses over 40 works – including her trademark, large-scale Technicolor compositions – alongside complete film works up until La Grande Sortie, a short created for the Paris Opera in 2015.
From Polyester onwards, the rise in the artist’s profile and prestige was vertiginous. The following series, titled The Big Valley, was shown in 2008 at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and in 2009 at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. In 2010, at New York’s MoMA, she was included as part of the highly influential New Photography exhibition and by 2012, she had netted an Emmy for her New York Times-commissioned video series Touch of Evil, as well as securing projects with Hollywood stars like Gary Oldman and Rooney Mara, and seen her work housed permanently at MoMA, Whitney Museum, SFMOMA and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
As a growing profile began to escalate, so Prager’s work started to take on a more monumental style – a spectacle of action, colour, gesture and detail. Face in the Crowd, perhaps one of the best-known collections, debuted at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2013. Shot in a Hollywood studio, the compositions involved painstakingly re-building the kind of public spaces in which people typically congregate and share in the city – streets, movie theatres, beaches and airports.
“Sometimes I find people on the street or in restaurants,” she says of casting for the works. “I’ll walk up to people if I feel like they have something really special that sparks my imagination – the colours they choose to wear, or the way they style their hair. There are reasons why people do these things before they leave the house. It’s a way of communicating who they are.” For the pieces, she used up to 350 models for a single shot, often bringing in a combination of friends, relatives and models found through agencies. The production team swelled up to 70 people, and each subject is carefully dressed and made-up before the shoot begins, so a very clear and recognisable tone is created in each image.
Speaking to Aesthetica, The Photographers’ Gallery curator Herschdorfer says: “Each of Prager’s subjects are linked by their ability to communicate very strong emotions. She can use many different mediums and languages – still and moving image, fashion and costume, personal and commissioned work – but the focus on female characters, and their psychological states, remains constant.” It is clear that Prager has grown with the camera. Whilst at first glance the pieces might seem like odes to the classic movies made from the city, referencing a Los Angeles life of make-believe, they are, in fact, piercingly honest self-portraits.
Silver Lake Drive runs 15 June -14 October at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
Monograph published by Thames &Hudson. www.thamesandhudson.com.
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