Alex Prager

NGV International

Melbourne

14 November 2014 – 19 April 2015

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

American photographer, Alex Prager’s first Australian exhibition surveyed her work from 2007 to 2013. It included three videos as well as a large number of Type C photographs, some titled ‘film still’.

Prager belongs to that group of photographers whose practice is sourced not in any particular film but in imagined ones. Cindy Sherman has long created such work, though Prager rarely uses herself as the main figure in her work. Tracy Moffat also works with imagined cinema (and actual film); Something More (1989) includes the best known single image of hers, though characteristically, even without being placed with the others in the series, it implies more of a narrative than do Prager’s images. Despite Moffat’s recent use of Hollywood film, her themes point away from Hollywood, while Prager’s are internal to that industry and our awareness of it. Prager herself names William Eggleston as her main influence, since it was he who led to her buying a camera and becoming a photographer. Certainly high contrast colour is a central part of her aesthetic, but unlike Eggleston, all of her work is fictional, evoking the women of Hollywood melodrama, like Hitchcock’s suspense movies or the film noir of the 1950s and ’60s. We complete the narratives she stages by drawing on Hollywood stories that provide, in the words of one of the chapters of the curatorial essay by Maggie Finch, ‘Artificial Collective Memories’.

Until she was thirteen, Prager lived in Los Angeles, and she has lived there at various times since. She talks of its centrality to her work and the unreal perfection of the location and its skies contrasting with the darkness and danger of life there, especially for

Alex Prager, Eve, 2008. Type C photograph, 91.4 x 114.3cm. Collection of the artist, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. © Alex Prager. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Alex Prager, Film Still, 2010. From the Despair series, 2010. Pigment print, 40.6 x 50.8cm. Collection of Jeff Vespa, Los Angeles. © Alex Prager. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.