Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive

Posted by Fabio 18 June 2018

Silver Lake Drive is a major new exhibition marking the first mid-career survey of American photographer and filmmaker, Alex Prager. Tracing Prager’s remarkably rich career over the last ten years and taking place over two gallery floors, the exhibition encompasses over 40 photographs including her trademark, large-scale Technicolor photographs alongside her complete film works.

In her celebrated Crowd series, each figure is presented in sharp focus drawing attention to individual characters and stories and hinting at interior lives, separate from outward appearances. Prager often depicts spaces where people find themselves, sometimes unwillingly, in close proximity to others: streets, beaches, airport lounges, theatres. Favouring an aerial perspective, she purposefully pushes the viewer into a position of surveillance, offering an optimal viewpoint to observe the characters in her frames. Occasionally, a single figure – usually a blond ingénue that seems lifted out of a Hitchcock film, or Douglas Sirk melodrama – looks directly up at the camera revealing the theatricality of the set-up.

This comprehensive exhibition presents over 40 photographs and her complete filmic oeuvre, all of which capture the banal and the fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical in Prager’s heightened reality.

Silver Lake Drive is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer and is produced in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle.

Alex Prager
Silver Lake Drive
The Photographers’ Gallery
15 June – 14 October 2018