Alex Prager
Melodrama and the hyperreal
'Alex Prager is an American photographer and film maker. In her elaborately conceived staged photographs, Prager openly references the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century American cinema and photography. Each of her lush colour images resembles a film still – entirely constructed and packed with emotion and human melodrama. In her film work she extends on her photographic practice, moving from the directorial mode in photography to directing an elaborately constructed film. Both aspects of her practice pair the banal and fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical, real life and cinematic representation in lush, richly coloured tableaux '
Alex Prager
Eve, 2008, type C photograph
The artwork titled Eve was made early in Prager's career. Prager says that she created Eve as a deliberate and playful appropriation of Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds.
Alex Prager
Big Valley, 2019, archival pigment print 121.9 × 175.3 cm
Alex Prager
Culver City, 2014, archival print , 149.9 x 224.8 cm
Activity- Read the information, look at the imagery and watch the video above (from the National Gallery of Victoria).
1. Test your comprehension of the video by completing the online quiz below and see if you can score 6 correct answers.
Activity
2. Use the internet to investigate the artist William Eggleston.
- When did he live? Where?
- Describe the subject matter he typically photographed.
- How did he use colour? Make a list of five words to describe his use of colour in photography.
- Explain some of the ways that you can see Eggleston's influence on the work of Alex Prager. Refer to subject matter, colour, lighting and point of view.
Alex Prager
(Left) Sheryl from the Week-End, 2009 chromogenic print, 61 x 45.7 cm
(Right) Crowd #7 (Bob Hope Airport), 2013, Pigment print, 149.6 x 197.6 cm
Activity
Art Criticism: Read through this excerpt, from a 2018 review of Alex Prager's exhibition in London:
'To encounter the work of Alex Prager ... is to experience visual culture shock, the dirty realism of monochrome Britain giving way to the hyperrealism of a postmodern America whose most tangible touchstones are filmic: the baroque strangeness of David Lynch, the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, the hallucinatory unease of Hitchcock circa Vertigo and Rear Window....
Silver Lake Drive – a quintessentially Prager title – presents 40 photographs and a retrospective of her films. It begins with the series The Big Valley, in which Hitchcock looms large – one image even shows a stylish woman startled by a flock of predatory birds. This kind of staged, heightened anxiety, unmoored from any context other than cinema, is a constant throughout this mid-career survey. Unlike the Hollywood films it borrows from, it exists purely as a visual trope, undercutting any emotional power the images might otherwise possess. This, of course, may well be intentional.
Prager has undeniably created a signature visual style that is sustained throughout two floors of this deftly curated show. In one enclave, a Lynchian greenlit room beckons the viewer. Once you emerge from it, the gallery seems bathed in a disorienting pinkish glow. Hitchcock, one suspects, would have approved. What lies beneath these meticulously choreographed mises en scene? For me, they depend so much on their photographic and filmic reference points and, as such, seem oddly empty of any deeper emotional resonance. Therein, too, of course, may lie their fascination for a contemporary art world that elevates photography about photography.'
3. Copy and paste the text from the exhibition review above into a digital word document. Note that there are five activities related to question 2.
- Use the highlighter tool to highlight five adjectives used to describe Prager's work in yellow.
- Select three words from your list that you are less familiar with, and type up a definition for those words
- Use the green highlighter tool to indicate words or phrases that are descriptive and which refer to structural frame details, such as the materials, scale, colours, use of light, props, costumes etc.
- Use the pink highlighter tool to indicate areas of the text that reflect the judgement of the critic. This might be positive or negative.
In this text, the critic Sean O'Hagan likens Prager's work to that of American filmmaker David Lynch. Despite this, he makes a specific criticism of Prager's work
- Explain O'Hagan's criticism in your own words and then respond. Do you agree with O'Hagan's comments? Give reasons for your answerType up your response below the annotated text and definitions you have just completed.
When finished, upload your analysis of this art critical writing to your shared digital platform for feedback.
Art Making Activity
Prager uses a range of camera angles to add an eerie psychological, Hitchcockian charge to her shots. Often she shoots from high above the scene and - unusually for a photographer - from down low at around knee height. Sometimes she uses groups and sometimes individuals as her subjects, but her images are always carefully composed. The images sometimes feel a little sinister; the viewer is not quite sure what is happening in the scene. Sometimes the backdrop is only the vibrant blue of the sky.
4. Compose a series of three photographs from a knee-high point of view. Carefully consider the outfits you or your characters might wear. Choose colours that will be vibrant and work well against the blue sky. Consider using one or two simple props, for example, a roll of newspaper, a gardening shovel, a wallet being passed between figures. If you cannot take the photograph against the sky, use an inside room with a white roof but use bright colours in the costume of your figures.
- If you have downloaded the Adobe suite and Photoshop, edit your three images to increase the saturation and intensity of the colours. Go to: Enhance > Adjust Colour > Adjust Hue/ Saturation and see if you can give your images a hyper-real effect that mimics the look of Prager's works. If you do not have this program you could play with the intensity of colours in Instagram or in any editing program.
- Upload your photographs to your class shared platform for feedback. These could be curated into a digital art gallery for the class to enjoy.