Iconic Hollywood style, candid street photography and cinematic staging all form part of the dramaturgy of LA-born photographer Alex Prager's work. The characters in each constructed scene are frozen by a nebulous mix of fear, love, shock and awe. Prager then uses these unsettling emotional undercurrents to belie the pastel-toned, American Dream aesthetic of her work.

"I'm interested in combining the worlds of the extraordinary and the mundane, then living in the middle of those two places," says Prager. "When looking at my work are people seeing something fantastical and artificial or real and raw that reflects who they are as a human?" 

From the blonde ingénue to the distraught femme fatale, Prager’s faux film still opus reverberates with classic Hitchcock heroines. The award-winning Compulsion (2012) series is set in hyper-real landscapes where women dangle from pylons, cars and buildings. The photographer's meticulous staging of every technicolor scene enables her to turn tragedy into a spectacle.

"A lot of my ideas dance around the world of artifice and documentary," says Prager, "and I try to allow for that to happen on my sets so there’s always a bit of chaos in a controlled environment.” 

The self-taught photographer has also used her intuitive understanding of melodrama to create a series of short films. In 2010 actor Bryce Dallas Howard starred in Despair, which was Prager’s first major foray into filmmaking. The following year the photographer won an Emmy for Touch of Evil, a New York Times video gallery of villainy starring George Clooney, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain and Ryan Gosling. 

Alex Prager will be opening an exhibition on her new work and screening the world premiere of her film, Play the Wind, at Lehmann Maupin Gallery from September 5  to October 26, 2019