![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-33.jpg\")
“Eve” from the series The Big Valley<\/i> (2008)<\/p>\n “Eve” from the series The Big Valley<\/i> (2008)<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything around me is a potential ingredient\u201d, says LA-based photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager<\/a> about where she finds the ideas for her trademark stylised compositions. Considering that Prager is best known for her highly saturated and staged images of emotional, lipsticked females that riff on Hitchcock heroines, her work\u2019s rooting in the everyday is somewhat surprising. \u201cReal life characters and experiences always spark some sort of seed, even a characteristic, or the outfit a person wears is a thread to a larger narrative that I can build on. I don\u2019t go out and seek these ideas \u2014 they float around in my world.\u201d On closer inspection, however, Prager\u2019s attention to the particulars of her day-to-day environment is what lends her imagery its uniquely uncanny quality. Drawing on multiple references \u2014 most notably canonical American photographers William Eggleston (\u201cAfter leaving an Eggleston exhibition at The Getty, over 10 years ago, I bought his book and that very same day decided to be a photographer\u201d), Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman, as well as Hollywood cinema \u2014 Prager\u2019s photographs and films prompt an uneasy sensation that you\u2019ve seen this before. Perhaps, it was at the movies, or glimpsed on a billboard somewhere, or even reminiscent of someone you once saw, her images appear to reenact moments of cinematic and cultural history, but with a strange and compelling magic all of their own.<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s been fun and very challenging putting all of my work together in one book,\u201d Prager tells SLEEK about the process of publishing her first monograph. \u201cBefore we began I thought it would be fairly straightforward \u2014\u00a0one image going after the other\u00a0\u2014 but in fact it was an intense almost-a-year\u2019s worth of work figuring out how everything makes sense together. I had to rip myself away from the experience of making each individual image and each body of work, and try to see it all as a whole, which was difficult for me.\u201d This difficulty has paid off: the result is a photobook that emphasises the recurring characters and colours, and key themes and motifs that ripple throughout Prager\u2019s varied ouvre, among them the performative feminine, thrilling theatrical scenarios \u2014 take seagulls descending on an unsuspecting Tippi Hedren type, or figures bobbing in an unreal emerald sea \u2014 and an awareness of what lies beneath the pretty sheen of white picket fence America \u2014\u00a0a trope commonly associated with the work of filmmaker David Lynch also. The familiarly of her photographic devices imparts an unnerving, tension onto her scenes. There is the feeling, as in Lynch’s films and TV shows, that all is not right. The more time one spends with Prager’s images, the more the safe familiarity fades and this unsettling feeling intensifies.<\/span> Silver Lake Drive is now available from Thames & Hudson<\/a>. The exhibition of the same name runs through to October 14 at The Photographer’s Gallery<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Borrowing from cinematic history, “Silver Lake Drive” is a luminous photobook celebrating the LA photographer’s career over the past decade. <\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[10780,10781,10782,4649,8746,968,10783,1984,6520,154,10784,451],"class_list":["post-66866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-alex-prager","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-ballerina","tag-cindy-sherman","tag-david-lynch","tag-film","tag-hieronymus-bosch","tag-los-angeles","tag-photobook","tag-photography","tag-silver-lake-drive","tag-the-photographers-gallery"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nThis magic is the subject of her Prager\u2019s first monograph, <\/span>Silver Lake Drive<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a lavish and luminous celebration of the photographer\u2019s career so far in conjunction with her mid-career survey at The Photographer\u2019s Gallery<\/a> in London. Over 200 pages, complete with interviews and essays, <\/span>Silver Lake Drive \u2014 <\/span><\/i>which takes its name from a street in Los Angeles<\/span> \u2014 <\/span><\/i>provides a comprehensive insight into a decade of mesmeric image-making. The book begins with <\/span>Polyester<\/span><\/i> from 2007, an ultra-referential set of images that explore the multiplicity and artifice of female identity in American culture.\u00a0 It goes through to her most recent project at La Grand Sortie in Paris, an intense <\/span>tour de force <\/span><\/i>documenting the various stages of performance of a prima ballerina \u2014 the dark romance of which recalls the silver screen classic, <\/span>The Red Shoes.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Certainly,<\/span> Silver Lake Drive\u00a0<\/span><\/i>is a dramatic and technicolour testament to Prager\u2019s dazzling artistic vision thus far.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Alex-Prgare_peclican-beach.jpg\")
“Crowd #3 (Pelican Beach)” from the series Face In The Crowd<\/i> (2013)<\/p>\n
\nAlthough the influence of Eggleston, Arbus and Sherman on Prager has been widely acknowledged, she regards artists as diverse as David Shrigley, Pipilotti Rist, Erwin Wurm, Duane Hanson, Tony Matelli, and even Hieronymus Bosch, as inspirations too. The influence of the Dutch master on Prager is perhaps most illuminating: Bosch was known for his highly-stylised and detailed narratives composed of multiple, individualised figures \u2014 a technique that is eerily echoed in Prager\u2019s celebrated <\/span>Crowd<\/span><\/i> series, where each individual, within a dynamic group, is accentuated as a beholder of a rich interiority all of their own. In this series and others, Prager\u2019s work is remarkable for its scrupulously detailed and constructed quality. She builds her own sets and props as well as making use of her proximity to Hollywood film sets to fashion vivid and fully-realised characters and environments, which blur the line between fact and fiction. \u201cI\u2019ve been able to create my own world through district visual elements. I style every detail meticulously, even the tiny ones like eyelashes, lipstick colour, nail shape, moustache or unibrow,\u201d explains Prager. Indeed, flicking through Silver Lake Drive<\/em>, there is the sense that she has invented an alternate universe all of her own, one that is in deeper, more vibrant colour and sharper focus than this one.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-188-189.jpg\")
“Orchestra East, Section B” from the series La Grand Sortie<\/i> (2016)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-68-69.jpg\")
“Irene” (2010) from the series Week-end & The Long Weekend <\/i> (2009- 2012)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-130-131.jpg\")
“Crowd #2 (Emma)” (2012) from the series Face in the Crowd<\/i> (2013)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-197.jpg\")
“Orchestra Centre (Intermission)” from the series La Grand Sortie<\/i> (2016)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-38-39.jpg\")
“Annie” from the series The Big Valley<\/i> (2008)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-91.jpg\")
“4:01 pm, Sun Valley” from the series Compulsion<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-191.jpg\")
“Act III, Scene 2” from the series La Grand Sortie<\/i> (2016)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-95.jpg\")
“3:14 pm, Pacific Ocean” from the series Compulsion<\/i> (2012)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-25.jpg\")
“Four Girls” from the series Polyester <\/i> (2007)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WEB-Pg.-64-65.jpg\")
“Rachel and Friends” (2009) from the series Week-end & The Long Weekend<\/i> (2009- 2012)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/alex-work-2.jpg\")
“Ellen” from the series Polyester <\/i> (2007)<\/p>\n