Alex Prager

Kee Chang lifts the veil on Alex Prager’s manicured world of women, cars and saturated skies, only to discover the sombre and even sinister lurking beneath.

“I became interested in photography after seeing a William Eggleston exhibition in 2000. A week later, I had bought a professional camera and all the darkroom equipment I would need to start making my own pictures,” reveals Alex Prager. “I became obsessed.”

And while twentysomething creative types who have similar epiphanies in their adolescent years might be a dime a dozen, Prager took her newfound passion as far as she could push it. Lucky for her, it paid off handsomely.

In just 10 years, the self-taught photographer would go on to show her work in high-profile exhibitions around Los Angeles, New York and London.

She would also set the blogosphere ablaze and earn the respect of tough, discerning critics who would be quick to size her up against cultural giants like Guy Bourdin, Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, and even Eggleston, who had unwittingly inspired her to pick up a camera in the first place.

The comparisons aren’t so far-fetched. Prager clearly belongs in the context of staged photography, and you can see the kind of influence its best-known exponents have had on her work.

As is often the case with those who operate in that world, she, too, engages deeply with film. Approaching her craft in a way that’s akin to what goes on behind the scenes around Tinseltown – location scouting, casting, set design – Prager’s hyper-real imagery seems to embody the narrative breadth of entire movies.

Her fondness for Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch is especially palpable. Prager riffs on the visual language of iconic films as a way to construct idyllic and artificial worlds, which are, in turn, irrevocably destabilised by the psychological desolation of her outwardly flawless female protagonists. From behind the heroines’ synthetic wigs and caked-on make-up emerges an underlying anxiety.

Prager’s mission – giving visual shape to this sort of dichotomy within a single snapshot – comes to the fore when asked to comment on her fascination with the 60s. “I think it’s ugly and very beautiful both at the same time, which is a hard rope to balance on.

The 60s seemed to get it just right.” However, as much as cinema serves as a fruitful source of inspiration for Prager, she’s not interested in collapsing complex stories to create single-frame movies. “There’s no particular narrative. I think of things more in still images. I guess if I thought about things more as entire narratives, I would have become a writer instead.”

This rings true for her short film, Despair, as well, which premiered last month at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. Completely devoid of dialogue or a linear storyline, it’s quite experimental.

According to Prager, “the concept was to show the before, during and after of one of my still photos.” Looking to the future, Prager talks about taking part in a group exhibition called New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this September.

But in true artist fashion, she remains tight-lipped when asked to elaborate on her long-term plans. Will she perhaps continue experimenting with moving images? “Yes, I’m interested,” she offers. Dodged like a real pro.