Alex Prager

Alex Prager is a self-taught artist inspired by American pop culture and 1970s cinema. Working in videography and photography, she creates cinematic images that is known for its nostalgia for the aesthetics of a bygone era, such as film noir and drama, which she re-appropriates using her own methods.

Prager was born in 1979 and raised in Los Angeles. She was inspired to pursue photography after visiting an exhibition on William Eggleston’s work at the Getty Museum. ‘I felt like I was struck blind by a vision and that was the path I was going to take for the rest of my life,’ she said. From that formative experience, Prager developed her distinctive, mise-en-scène style of photography, shooting highly staged scene in saturated colours with her Nikon N90s camera. Her photographs invite viewers into surreal, emotionally charged narratives, blending nostalgia with an eerie sense of tension.

Cinema and a sense of drama recur in Prager’s work, taking inspiration from her hometown and Hollywood. The photographer often makes references to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, as well as the works of Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson.

Her career turned a corner when one of her photos was presented in 2010 at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the New Photography exhibition. Since then, her work has been the focus of several shows and a 2018 retrospective organised by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Locle and the Lehman Maupin gallery (New York/Hong Kong).

In addition to her photography, films have been an essential part of Prager’s artistic output. Her short film Despair (2010), starring actress Bryce Dallas Howard, is a visual homage to film noir, reflecting her love for old Hollywood.

As a trailblazing contemporary artist, Alex Prager’s exploration of human emotions through photography and film has made her one of the most influential visual storytellers of her generation.