ANATOMY OF AN ARTWORK
VIRTUAL REALITY
It wasn’t until 1999, when then nineteen-year-old Alex Prager visited an exhibition
ALEX PRAGER Simi Valley, 2014
of William Eggleston’s work at the Getty Museum, that she considered being
$30,000–50,000
a photographer. Now, the Los Angeles native meticulously arranges the scenes
Photographs New York Exhibition: 30 March–4 April Auction: 5 April Enquiries: +1 212 894 1149
she photographs with stylised, cinematic melodrama. Enhanced with digital effects, Prager’s pictures evoke the atmosphere of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch with a slickness that borders on the theatrical. From morbidly saccharine women to faces captured in a crowd, her subjects exude a noirish sense of isolation, even when they are rendered in her signature Technicolor aesthetic. “I never wanted to take a picture that looked realistic,” Prager has said, adding she’s always wished her photographs “to have that false appearance and marry the worlds of reality and fiction.”
5 1
3
2
4
Prager uses the software programme to compile images from the mass media and her own camera without attempting to conceal her manipulations. The ensuing visual flatness is a trademark of her style.
96
SOTHEBY’S
2. MID-CENTURY FASHION Makeup, clothing and pop culture references from the 1950s and 1960s abound in Prager’s bold compositions, but contemporary fashions also appear, keeping the time period ambiguous.
3. CROWDS Prager has long been fascinated by crowds – the subject of her first solo US museum exhibition in 2013. To create her staged worlds, she compresses large groups of aimless, apathetic-looking models into small spaces.
4. CINEMATIC EFFECT Prager, also a filmmaker, is inspired by the suspense and melodrama of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, as well as the synthetic glamour of Los Angeles, a common setting for her photographs.
5. ROBERT FRANK Simi Valley shares similarities with Robert Frank’s 1955 Trolley—New Orleans, the cover image for his seminal photobook, The Americans. As in Frank’s picture, a wall of windows conveys the riders’ alienation and isolation.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG
1. PHOTOSHOP