There are numerous reasons why photographer Alex
Prager has gained such success and adoration, but one standout factor is her
ability to make viewers see the world for its busy but dressed-up glory. She
does so by setting a scene, something similar to daily life but eerily
unfamiliar. The photographer creates sets to do this, but it’s a set you’d
unknowingly walk past, a bus stop or a cinema crowd cast full of friends,
family and the famous. It’s this mix of the real and the staged that’s seen
curators at the world’s largest galleries fall for Alex, alongside the rest of
us. You can’t help but stop and stare at an image by Alex Prager.
Besides the final photographs, the films and the
exhibitions, what’s always intrigued me about Alex is her career trajectory.
Photography wasn’t a natural pathway for her. It wasn’t a talent encouraged
when someone saw some amateur snaps she’d taken, but a defiant decision as a
creative outlet.
“I’d been working three jobs,” Alex tells It’s Nice That, the day before
her mid-career retrospective is to open at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. “I
was a receptionist and I was working in a clothing store; on the weekends I’d
pass out flyers for clubs to earn money. I was noticing that no matter how hard
I worked as a receptionist, I’d always get paid the same amount and that really
frustrated me. Even if I didn’t work very hard for two weeks I’d still get the
same paycheck as when I was trying to be innovative, creative. When I realised
that, I always kind of knew that there was something bigger for me to do
because I always had a lot of energy. I needed a place to funnel it and I knew
it was going to be a creative field…somewhere.”
Alex then didn’t force a creative pursuit but just
went looking for one. Always alone, “so I wouldn’t be influenced by anyone
else’s ideas,” she started going to watch bands play, she went to museums, and
in what turned out to be a defining decision, she went to The Getty to see a
show by William Eggleston. “I was looking for my outlet and when I saw the
Eggleston show I felt the physical and emotional reaction to his work,” she
says. “I’d never really noticed photography being used as art before, I’d
previously only known it as fashion and advertising. I wanted to know more. It
felt like magic to me at the time.”
The photographer was instantly inspired and what
followed reflects the way many began their creative pursuits in the early
2000s, using an all or nothing mentality aided by the internet. She visited a
second-hand camera store and bought a professional camera. She turned to eBay
and bought darkroom equipment, she gathered everything on photography she could
find. “Within the same week… I just went for it.”
Street photography was where Alex began. In Silver
Lake Drive, the accompanying book to the exhibit of the same name, she notes
obsessing over Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Weegee, then taking
portraits while studying the works of Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden. She staged
guerrilla shows in a laundrette or hairdressers and watched to see how people
acted, looking for a similar reaction to the one she had with Eggleston. “It
was at those shows I was noticing how people were responding to the work and it
was the images I had the most fun making, the colour and staged photographs. I
naturally started going more in that direction,” she explains. “There was a lot
of trial and error, reading a bunch of books, a tonne of books, studying
filmmakers and other people’s trajectories. You know… mixing it all up.”
What followed was Polyester in 2007, a series of
staged images harking back to previous eras through the cut of 60s style
dresses or a flick of eyeliner. This continues in 2008’s The Big Valley and
Week-End & The Long Weekend made from 2009 — 2012. The images regularly
feature slightly timid women in unexplained distress, fully clothed in the sea
for instance, or a crowd of ladies drinking cans of beer but one is staring off
into the distance, contemplating with a cigarette. While making these works,
influences grew and grew. “It’s really a mash-up,” she explains. “Everything
that goes into my work is so personal. It’s Los Angeles [the artist’s home] as
a strange, ugly, yet stunningly beautiful backdrop. It’s the experiences that I
have that make me uncomfortable, or make me ask a question or try and solve
problems. It’s imagery that I’ve seen in media, it’s nostalgia for a safer
time, it’s so many different things."
As Alex grew in success, knowledge and on-set
experience, the number of people in her photographs begins to increase. In
2012’s Compulsion tension and dramatisation grows too. The images depict houses
on fire and women holding on to the back of a car in mid-air. In between these
photographs, gaps are filled with close-ups of worried, concerned and angry
looking eyes. But it’s Face in the Crowd made a year later, that many will
recognise her name for.
Debuting at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in
2013, Face in the Crowd marked Alex’s first museum show in the USA as the sole
artist, but also her practice expanding to include film. It’s these pieces that
people often find themselves absorbed in, noticing characters that remind them
of someone, or even themselves. The shoot also took the most planning,
including 350 people, so that a “natural chaos” occurred. “That’s where the
good stuff happens!” says Alex on encouraging some chance in photographs that
are organised. “It’s those moments that I’m looking for in these completely
staged, meticulously controlled environments that I’ve created. That’s what a
street photographer is always looking for on the street. I’m kind of setting up
the street, then looking for all those unplanned moments, as well as capturing
the world that I intended to.” It’s a technique that has continued and
developed, reaching a considerable peak in the latest work of the
photographer’s La Grande Sortie, made with the Paris Opera Ballet.
A gem within Silver Lake Drive is a section of
behind-the-scenes photographs where you get to see Alex at work. It’s within
these backstage photographs you start to see the mammoth task Alex sets herself
with each series and wonder how on earth it went to plan. “Oh my god I know,”
laughs Alex on the point of how it’s ridiculous she’s even pulled half of her
work off. “Even when I’m looking at them I’m like holy shit! I’m so focused on
what I’m making at the time the logistics of how to make something is far from
my mind,” the photographer explains. “If I thought about the logistics first I
would just have to be crazy to try and attempt it, especially back in the day
when I had no money, no technical idea of how to go about doing certain things,
and no crew.”
Alex’s enthusiasm, built from hope, is a direct
influence of Alex’s home: “That’s the thing about growing up in Los Angeles,
you get to watch the movie industry make all these impossible worlds, it’s
always been inspiring to me,” she points out. “Any time I felt like something
wasn’t possible I think they could have done it if it was a movie. Then, I’m
like right, we have no excuse we have to figure it out. We’ve had to figure it
out so many times, on barely any budget, barely any anything! But we’ve always
managed to figure it out.”
Things have understandably not always gone to plan in
some of Alex’s works – she even notes encouraging a friend to jump on a
trampoline in heels repeatedly until she broke her ankle four shots in. “I
don’t know why we didn’t think of that,” she says. Yet it’s a risk that always
pays off. This is also down to Alex’s close team, who she constantly praises,
and thrives off working with. “I love it. That’s one thing I love about making
films is a huge team collaborating to make one vision possible. It’s really
exciting to me, it’s invigorating,” she gushes. “I love it so much, but I also
love my downtime. I have a six-month-old right now so I appreciate being home
more than ever now.”
Silver Lake Drive, the book and the show, finish with
Alex’s final work to date, La Grande Sortie, marking ten years worth of work
from Polyester in 2007. It’s a high honour for any artist to achieve a
mid-career retrospective, one Alex affably describes as “very surreal” but
completely deserved. We finish our interview by discussing the idea that during
the course of The Photographers’ Gallery exhibit someone could wander round and
be as inspired as she was when she visited the William Eggleston show in her
early 20s. “Oh my god. That would be amazing,” she says.
Still always humble, Alex doesn’t see her work as life
changing; she just wants it to shake people up a little, to change the way they
think, if just for a minute. “I mean, hopefully people will connect in some
personal way and maybe it will remind them of something that they were meant to
do, or something they still want to do, or somebody they used to know or forgot
about. Who knows,” she ponders. “There are so many different ways it could go
but I just hope that they walk away with something that wasn’t there when they
walked in.”
Silver Lake Drive,
will be on display at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 15 June — 14
October 2018, the accompanying book, published by Thames & Hudson.
By Lucy Bourton. It’s Nice That, June
19, 2018
Alex Prager’s hyperreal America – in pictures.
From a car in a hole to a house ablaze, the American
photographer’s bold, bright and frequently unsettling work captures the
disquiet of modern life
The Guardian , June 14, 2018.
Prager is perhaps best known for her 2013 film Face in
the Crowd, which sees a blonde starlet, played by Elizabeth Banks, wander
reluctantly through a swarm of strangers. The work deals with Prager’s
existential phobia of crowds, which reached crisis point after her first major
museum show. “I was suddenly asked to do public speaking, and I got a really
overpowering physical stage fright,” she says. “It wasn’t the kind of stage
fright where you get nerves or you shake, it was physically paralysing.”
Through suspense-inducing scores, frantic eye movements and the protagonist’s
respective senses of calm and hysteria, Prager examines the conflicting
emotions of an introvert. The work hinges on the smartly judged contrast
between composed exterior and the inner existential anxiety that often
underpins the human experience.
Prager masks these dark emotions with a seductive
retro aesthetic referencing post-war photography in tandem with the work of
cinematic icons like Hitchcock and Lynch. Her aim is to traverse time, blending
elements from the 40s up to the present day. “I love the idea that nostalgia
makes us feel safe and comfortable because we have seen it before. I love the
concept of familiarity because it gives us this false sense of security. The
past always seems nicer than the present, but who fucking knows what it was
like back then. We just don’t know, but that past give us that feeling and I
love disorientating people.”
In her latest work, La Grande Sortie, she takes her
distinctly American lens to the Paris Ballet. The prima ballerina, played by
Émilie Cozette, takes the stage at the Opéra Bastille and begins to dance an
adaptation of Benjamin Millepied’s piece Amoveo. At first, the performance
resembles what Prager calls a “PBS-style” movie, “a weird glorified point of
view”. Prior to making the film, this is how Prager had always experienced the
ballet, she says. Suddenly the perspective switches into the dancer’s mind, and
things start to quickly unravel; consumed by her own stage fright, the dancer
becomes acutely aware of the audience, until their gaze almost consumes her.
The intention behind the project was to explore the ballerina’s subjectivity,
exploring the tension between what is real and perceived.
Prager’s vision isn’t easy to realise. She works with a
large team of stylists, hair and make-up artists, cinematographers and sound
designers. The projects are meticulously planned down to the specificity of
every single wig and eyebrow. “I start off with rough sketches then sometimes I
create collages or write stories,” she says. “I have meetings with my team, we
will discuss it, and people can bring up anything they want. It’s a safe space,
as we all know each other so well and it’s great to get input from other
people. When I shot La Grande Sortie, we brought out my entire team and 13 bags
of costumes props and wigs. We knew if we had tried to source everything in
Paris it wouldn’t have been the right thing. I wanted Le Grande Sortie to have
an American viewpoint of the Paris ballet.”
Over time Prager has developed a very personal way of
utilising the tools of Hollywood to explore the interplay between truth and
fiction. The lines blur in her meticulously crafted images challenging the
audience’s implicit expectations. They are an open invitation to explore the
genuine fear and emotions which permeate our lives on a daily basis. Prager is
a true alchemist and once you step foot in her world, nothing is how it seems.
Exploring Hollywood’s Sinister Underbelly, with Artist
Alex Prager. By Gem Fletcher. AnOtherMagazine , June 11, 2018
The best horror movie in New York City right now is
Alex Prager’s La Grande Sortie, a 10-minute film playing on continuous loop at
the Chrystie Street branch of Lehmann Maupin Gallery. The film is the latest
entry in Prager’s oeuvre of cinematic and photographic investigations into
subjects that tantalize and challenge the viewer. For those unfamiliar with
Prager’s work in both mediums, it’s worth taking a brief journey into her
previous work, which will bring the current exhibition into sharper focus.
Seeing a Horror Movie Through the Reactions of Its
Spectators.
By Melissa Stern , Hyperallergic , October 13, 2016
La Grande Sortie. Watch the film here. Opera de Paris
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