Alex Prager lives and works in Los Angeles. She began her career as photographer after seeing a William Eggleston show and hasn’t put her camera down since. Prager has seamless expanded into filmmaking and has embarked on the commercial world with the same vision and vigor seen in her fine art imagery and films.
Her work consists of elaborately staged scenes that draw inspiration from a wide range of influences and references, including Hollywood cinema, experimental films, popular culture, and street photography. Her familiar yet uncanny imagery depicts worlds that synthesize fiction and reality. The highly choreographed nature of her photographs and films embody a visual vocabulary and style that has become uniquely her own.
Prager has received numerous awards, including the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2012), The Vevey International Photography Award (2009), and The London Photographic Award (2006). Her editorial work has been featured in prominent publications, including Vogue, W Magazine, New York Magazine and her film series Touch of Evil, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, won a 2012 Emmy award. Despair, Prager’s first film was exhibited alongside her work in the New Photography show at The Museum of Modern Art (2010). She was also commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet, which inspired her to create La Grande Sortie, a 10-minute film and a body of work that was shown at Lehmann Maupin (2016).
Her first major public commission, Applause, for Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment, New York, took place in the summer of 2017. In the fall of 2018 an excerpt from Prager’s Face in the Crowd film was shown across all of the large-scale screens at Westfield World Trade Center, New York and Westfield Century City, Los Angeles as part of the Westfield and Art Production Fund (APF) third installment of their ongoing video art program.
This past June 2018, Silver Lake Drive, a major monograph of Prager’s work, was published by Thames & Hudson, followed by the Chronicle Books US edition release in October 2018. The monograph coincided with Prager’s first mid-career survey at The Photographer’s Gallery in June 2018 which will be traveling to the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland and opening November 2018.