Alex Prager’s photographs are full of true lies

Midwinter London gets a splash of Hollywood Technicolor on January 21 as LA photographer and film-maker Alex Prager opens a show of new work at Lehmann Maupin’s gallery in Cromwell Place. The hyper-real images in Part One: The Mountain sing with the 42-year-old’s trademark polish, but the series marks a shift away from the stylised crowd scenes that previously characterised her work. Instead, each photo is a dreamlike portrait of an individual, frozen in the motion of their own world. In “Dusk” (2021), for example, a woman in a summer dress hangs upside down as the contents of her clutch bag — dollar bills, coins, lipstick — tumble around her.

It is a powerful way to encapsulate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. “The idea of a mountain is of a primal place where we go when we are isolated and alone,” Prager says. “It is representative of the out-of-control reckoning of life and love during the past two years, which have been transformative for everyone I know. It felt tone-deaf to do another crowd scene.” The uncertainties of the time weigh on her still. “The state of the world is confusing, nothing has settled yet, we are still going through it,” she says, regretting that travel restrictions make it unlikely that she can be in London for the opening of her show.

When we speak over Zoom in early January, she is visiting family in Florida and her backdrop is as impossibly real as her portraits. She sits outside, framed by a rich, blue sky and a gnarled tree; Prager is centre stage, with an up-do and poised charm that exude the appeal of a Hitchcock blonde — she cites the director as one of her inspirations.

Whether her protagonists are falling, flying or floating is for us to decide, she says, but there is a sense of progression and optimism in her heightened colours and theatrical poses. Each person has a story and more to tell, through a process that Prager defines as “some sort of death and rebirth”.

Such an arc is, Prager says, born of a need to fill a gap that she feels has been abandoned by world leaders. “We need to expel the present because the present fucking sucks. There is nothing for the youth to cling to in our future, no real stories told about what could come next. We at least have to give them something to believe in,” she says, adding that she has a four-year-old child. “All facts start in the imagination. You put ideas into the world and they become fact when people agree.”

This is not how everyone understands facts and is risky territory in an era of fake news and conspiracy theories, but Prager says these are precisely what need to be countered with the sense of a journey and by attending to the experiences of others. “It is irresponsible not to give inspiration. Others will just fill the void with stories that become more interesting to people just because they are stories,” she says.

The interplay of reality, fantasy and mythmaking has always dominated the work of the artist, who grew up in Hollywood. Her inspirations were street photographers — notably William Eggleston, whose sharp observations of America propelled her to be an artist — and also film-makers. As well as Hitchcock, she cites Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose visual shades, elegiac motifs and ability to pinpoint human emotions clearly run through Prager’s work too.

Her practice morphed into film-making, with her first — “Despair” (2010) — included in New York’s Museum of Modern Art show New Photography 2010. A short film of the subjects in the work accompanies this month’s show to offer more context to her subjects. “There is something addictive about film because there are so many different components to communicate. With photography, you just have the visual. But in some ways that makes it more poetic, to say something with less and be laser-sharp,” she says.

The reaction of an audience to her work is important to Prager, who wants people to identify and refract their own stories through her images. She relishes a memory from early in her career, when she hung up her photographs to dry in the laundry room of her MacArthur Park apartment building. “When I went back, I knew which ones people liked because they weren’t there any more. I was putting on a show without knowing it,” she says. The professional team now around her prevents such giveaways — the editioned works in her London show are priced between $20,000 and $60,000 each — while she boasts collectors such as Elton John and the financier David Teitelbaum and his wife Sayoko. She is in public institutions around the world.

She is, of course, aware of the phenomenon of digital art backed by non-fungible tokens, but for now this feels alien to her practice. “I spend so much time and focus on making my physical prints that it is hard for me to wrap my head around NFTs. For now they feel a bit like 3D glasses in terms of being a craze,” she says.

Prager’s work — clear and upfront but also full of artifice — chimes with the age we are in. She notes how we toy with social media but that such trickery is not a new phenomenon. “They teach you on screenwriting courses that nobody ever says exactly what they mean,” she says. “Aren’t we all imagining our identities every time we leave the house? And we are not the same person each day. Artifice is just a layer woven into reality.”

‘Part One: The Mountain’, January 21-March 5, lehmannmaupin.com