THIS WEEK’S MUSE
ALEX PRAGER: PHOTOGRAPHER
“My work reflects my love of people, a deep love for people, with all their quirks; it’s all in the detail.”
Alex Prager is an American photographer known for creating elaborate and intricately staged color photographic narratives.
She was born in 1979 in Los Feliz – a small Los Angeles neighborhood just south of Griffin Park.
She dropped out of school at sixteen and, after seeing a photographic exhibition by William Eggleston, took up photography at twenty-one.
She is entirely self-taught, learning as she goes. “I never went to the venerable art institutions, I’m not in the club, I was never going to be in their system.”
Eggleston is widely acknowledged for elevating color photography as a legitimate art form, and Prager was drawn to his ‘new’ bold approach.
But she was also drawn to his interest in ordinary people; the drama he revealed in the mundane. “He shot such mundane subjects and people,” Prager said, “but there was such an emotional reaction. I didn’t understand that but wanted to know more.”
She has come to be defined by her immersive, large-scale photographs of elaborately staged scenes.
Often large groups of people, each cast a different role and each with a different story to tell.
The photographs take place on beaches, in towns, highways, gas stations – sites we recognize and relate to. Locations we’ve been.
But the result is far from familiar.
There is an opposition between what we recognize in the image – the individual elements – and the story being told as a whole.
The image is entirely artificial, but something real comes through the camera onto the paper.
Her work is punctuated with cinematic drama, but unlike a film, where we are privileged to see the narrative unfold and be resolved at the end, Prager’s images don’t settle and don’t give us the answers.
Her protagonists, awash with stylized filmic color, have come together at a moment in time, for a reason we never discover.
We accept there must be one, but we must join the dots ourselves. Because the resolution never comes, the drama and the emotion remain heightened – intense and frustrating; but energetic and exciting.
For Prager, her exquisitely staged and painstakingly executed images, created over a period of time, are emotional and technical commitments.
In execution, she is a million miles away from those some critics judge as “real photographers” – the more impulsive, experimental or journalistic styles of Robert Capa, Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
But look at the emotional effect she has on the viewer – how she peels back the curtain on the mundane and finds the humanity and reality, then it becomes clear her work is closer to her forebears’ art than we are at first prepared to admit.
“My purpose was always to put pictures into the world and make people have a better understanding of themselves and lift their awareness of each other.”
Her exhibition “Part Two: Run” is open at Lehmann Maupin in New York until March 4.
HAPPENING
Four Tuesdays, from March 7. 9:30–11:30am
INTRODUCTION TO GOUACHE PAINTING
With Patty Barnes
Discover new skills through an exciting new medium.
Member – $112, Non-member – $128