You cannot help but fall in love with the predominant cinematic presence of Alex Prager's work. A 31 year old American photographer, with a wispy blonde Zooey Deschanel look that's just as gorgeous as her photography Alex Prager conjures up the Hollywood sadcore vibe Lana Del Rey creates through her music. Really the two should collaborate on Lana's album artwork, the results would undoubtedly be a gorgeous merging of talent and beauty. To me, Alex Prager's work is a vibrant flood of colour and classic glamour; they are Tom Ford's catwalks stilled, they are a section torn from a 1970s Vogue, they are a freeze frame of a Hollywood starlets intimacy. With glowing skin, pouts aplenty, sleek wigs and luxurious fabrics creating an enchanting and electric aura Prager presents an undercurrent of classic Americana culture, harking back to the days of the Chateau Marmont and Marilyn Monroe's sensational curves. Like the Chateau Marmont there is a sense of mystery and secrecy to Prager's photos; a feeling that we are not seeing everything, anything could be happening just out of shot, prior to or subsequent to the capturing of the photo. This heightens the extent to which it feels as if a raw moment of emotion is caught on camera, for instance when Bryce Dallas Howard's eyes appear brimming with an ocean of tears, perhaps this is an attempt at paying further homage to Hitchcock who often threw his actresses into real situations to capture realism and extreme reactions. As clearly, Hitchcock and his leading ladies have influenced Prager. In the words of the Guardian "Hitchcock's women are outwardly immaculate, but full of treachery and weakness," a statement that could also be applied to Prager's women. Whom are just as charming, gripping, domineering and entrancing as Hitchock's; immaculate, radiant, lustrous matriarchs for Beyonce's 'Run The World (Girls)' single yet rife with a rawness, a fragility, a prevailing sense that all is not quite what it seems.
In a sense Prager's women could be a protagonist of Susann's controversial 'Valley Of The Dolls' or a character of Russ Meyer's psychedelic movie 'Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls;' they could be Hollywood starlets that outwardly appear to have it all but are inwardly plagued with addiction, despair and tragedy. Alex Prager merges Hitchcock's horror phenomenon with Susann's acclaimed novel, creating photos brimming with pathos. Prager challenges our modern societies method of thinking; our frequency to jump to conclusions, to take sides and believe that beauty is everything paralleling Hitchcock's challenges to cinematic conventions. Her photos are brave, scratching beneath the veneers of perception in the same vein Susann's novel did in 1966. Together Hitchcock and Susann captured teen culture; drawing together an age of exploration, an aura of vulnerability, a overwhelming desire for fame, a feeling of power and beauty, an urge to explore, a belief the world is conquerable. Prager's photos do the same. Every frame tells a story. The story is just entirely open to interpretation.
