Despair

Alex Prager

Taking aesthetic cues from film, fashion photography, pulp fiction, and her native city of Los Angeles, Alex Prager produces Technicolor photographs with dark, unsettling undercurrents. “I find my inspiration in the city of Los Angeles,” she explains. “It’s a strange picture of perfection—but there is an eerie monotony that creeps in. It can slowly drive a person crazy, that sense of unease under the surface of all this beauty and promise.” Populated by seductively stylized women, Prager’s photographs resemble vintage Hollywood movie stills. She constructs ambiguous scenes weighted with the uneasy expectation of impending danger. References to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch and the photographs of Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson abound in her work.