Photographers to know / Link 18 : Alex Prager

Wendy – Week-End 2010, photographed by Alex Prager.

Alex Prager, a 29-year old photographer grew up between Los Angeles and Switzerland, her work reflecting the unreal reality of the influence of a cinematic childhood. After experiencing an exhibition by William Eggleston, this self-taught photographer never looked back.

Inspired by the high drama of classic movies—which, despite their theatricality, touch upon genuine emotions of alienation, fear, anger, longing, and lust—Prager's images seem at first to be all exquisite surface. However the girls of this series—named “Barbara,” “Jane,” “Lois” and other such conventional and slightly old-fashioned monikers—conceal pain beneath their lipstick-lined smiles and dead eyes. Informed largely by Los Angeles, with its perpetual blue skies and birds singing from imported palm trees, Prager’s work exudes an underlying sense of the eerie monotony and unease that can permeate beneath the surface of beauty and the promise of happiness.

Annie – The Big Valley 2008, photographed by Alex Prager

In the artist's own words, she is “documenting a world that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time.” The trilogy began with girls playing archetypal roles in Polyester. Then in The Big Valley, the roles took on lives of their own, and the separation between make-believe and real life began to dissolve. With Week-end, which signifies the peak as well as the extent of the period, the façade becomes so thick that the illusion is now more real than the world they actually live in.

After the release of her first book The Book Of Disquiet (2005) Prager was given her first solo show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA entitled "Polyester", which was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Along with her 2008 exhibition at The Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, Prager is slated to exhibit in New York in 2009.

"Her photographs reveal a keen eye for the shining and the bizarre, a bit Annie Leibovitz, a bit Diane Arbus."- The Los Angeles Times

Alex Prager continues to live and work in the Los Angeles area.

Eve – The Big Valley 2008, photographed by Alex Prager