I came across Alex Prager in my first PHOT201 brief lecture. I chose to research her because of her style of photography. Her style of photography is inspired by William Eggleston but her images only tell you a little bit about the story of the images and . eaves the reader guessing a lot. The image that really made me realise this was 'Hand Model' as ti just shows a picture of a hand with red painted finger nails and a gold ring. Stereotypically everyone would assume this was a woman but how do we know it's a woman, it could be a man, it could be a drag queen who knows? After researching I now know...
Prager had never picked up a camera until the age of 21 but has now won Emmy's for her photography. During a phone interview she said who inspired her to stop what she was doing and to start taking photographs full time. "I saw William Eggleston's works at the Getty, and there was never any question in my mind about what I would be doing from that point on," even though she had been inspired and knew that she wanted to create films and photos she said "it took seven years before I felt like I'd hit my stride and that what I was imagining was actually getting onto paper." This proves to me that being a photographer isn't easy and if I don't like my photography for ages then a very successful photographer and film maker felt the same for 7 years!
Since first struggling to like any images she made she has secured projects with Hollywood superstars like Gary Oldman and Rooney Mara. In 2012 she recieved an Emmy for her New York Times commissioned video series 'Touch of Evil'. She has an exhibtion in Hong Kong currently simply called 'Alex Prager' which is showing seven new works that continue her ongoing interrogation of human perception by exploring the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction. She says about the exhibition "I've always been interested in how your 'reality' can change depending on what mood you're in," "I like throwing people off balance and making things a bit stranger than they expect." She normally and quite often does this by playing with scale and form in post production.
Hand Model, 2017 is in three different forms, a sculpture, a photograph and in another image with 'Star Shoes', the sculpture represents a woman's outstretched hand protruding from the gallery wall. It's an implication to how the fashion and advertising industries unrealistically scale and crop images, the hand is again seen in the photograph 'Hand Model' which has been blown up in size and then features in a second image called 'Star Shoes'.
"Since the beginning, I've always been building my own sets and props," Prager said. "Using them to change how people perceive the pieces is really exciting to me."
During her career she has had a recurring subject matter, people. She is known to use 300 models to achieve a single shot, using her friends and family members, models from casting agencies and she sometimes even brings people in off the street. "Sometimes I find people on the street or in restaurants," she said. "I'll walk up to people if I feel like they have something really special that sparks my imagination -- the colours they chose to wear, or the way they styled their hair. There are reasons (why) people do these things before they leave the house. It's a way of communicating who they are." Months of planning go into these bigger shoots as she has to get a strong concept behind the image as well if it's going to work successfully as a single image and not as a series of images. "But her work hinges on the element of unpredictability that her subjects bring to the shoot -- an undercurrent of emotions and personal concerns that Prager cannot control. Nor does she endeavor to.
"It's a hard balance to strike," she said. "I think that's why I still get nervous before these projects -- because there's always going to be that unpredictability. I need that to make the work good."
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/alex-prager-photography/index.html
http://www.alexprager.com/#!/photography/La-Grande-Sortie
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