Ladies Behind Lenses is a column that explores films directed, produced, and written by women who are kicking ass within the male-centric world of cinema.
Photographer Alex Prager is an artist whose skill at composing cinematic snapshots that ooze synthetic Hollywood glamour has placed her in the realm of contemporary photography greats. Prager’s series of elaborately orchestrated and costumed scenes manage to synthesize fiction with documentary into a hybrid form, throughout which you will find nods to Alfred Hitchcock and William Eggleston. In recent years, the Los Angeles based photographer has slowly made a transition to film which; honestly, if you’re familiar with her work it will come as no surprise. Prager’s stylized staged scenes are extremely referential of old Hollywood cinema and mid-20th century style while still inheriting a certain timelessness.
Prager, a self-taught photographer, started her work in still photography after she happened to catch a William Eggleston exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. She was around 20 years old and at the time never thought of photography as an art form before, but in that moment she had found her calling. Within a week of seeing the Eggleston show she had bought a camera and dark room equipment off eBay and started creating her own photographs – six months later she had first show in LA. Of course, there is a long way between a first camera to a serious career in fine art photography, however her natural talent and alluring aesthetic seemed to have help her along the way. Her later turn to the medium film came about rather naturally—it seemed almost inevitable. She was fascinated about the idea of showing viewers what happens right before or after each of her photos, and looking at her films as more of a moving image rather than a film with a rigid narrative structure.
A particularly prevalent theme in all of her work is the subject of crowds. Her fascination with crowds stems from emotions that most people encounter: anxiety, wonder, panic. In fact, her largest body of work to date, Face in the Crowd, was composed of large-scale meticulously staged crowd scenes. Scenes set on a beach, a movie theater, lobby, an airport—offering the audience a deep awareness of each individual within the scene as well as the crowd as a whole.
OK, so enough of me just rambling on about the brilliance of Alex Prager… check out her films below and see for yourself!
La Grande Sortie, 2015
Her latest short film manages to conflate the traditional roles of viewer and performer by addressing the anxiety of the dancer on stage and the inherit tension between performer and audience.
Sunday, 2011
Sunday debuted several years before her ambitious series Face in the Crowd but you can get a sense of where the artists’ mind was headed towards from watching this survey of people each seemingly caught in a private moment of their own.
Despair, 2010
In her first short film, Prager made a cinematic melodrama taking cues from the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired 1948 ballet The Red Shoes. The film focuses on one emotion—despair—through her eerie juxtaposition of dreamy femme fatale aesthetics and heightened tragedy.
Film Column by Ida Yazdi. Find her online at @idaym.