Saturday, May 16, 2009

Alex Prager





Alex Prager

Work from The Big Valley

There is a peculiar Cindy Sherman meets Alfred Hitchcock quality that brought me to explore this work further, and I am not surprised at all to find that I am not the only one to have thought along those lines. Collection of reviews here.

"Prager photographs her female subjects in a style unashamedly reminiscent of the great mid 20th Century film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. Within the naivety of her compositions and colour palette there is the suggestion of an impending narrative, not unlike old movie stills once displayed outside every cinema. Prager’s photographs offer us segments of stories that encourage us to imagine for ourselves the missing passages beyond the edges of the frame. Often shot from an unexpected angle and unusually lit, the audience are positioned very much as voyeurs. Synthetic wigs, fake birds and retro costumes are meticulously planned and her models cast as players frozen in the narrative. On the surface these models appear polished and eerily near perfection, a utopia sprung with tension. Like Guy Bourdin, the king of photographic mise-en-scène, Prager demands more than simply a ‘pretty picture’. " - from Michael Hoppen Contemporary

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