Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive

(Paperback)

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The definitive monograph on Alex Prager, one of the truly original image makers of our time.

Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker whose elaborate sets and complex staging draw on a rich cultural heritage of cinematic style, informed by street photography, to produce work that is unerringly memorable. At once temporal and timeless, bright but shadowed, Prager's images exist within a hyperreal world, deeply rooted in the eerie undertones of Los Angeles, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred.

Prager's critically acclaimed work is introduced here, spanning a decade of photographic work and five films. This collection of carefully curated photographs is complemented by an in-depth interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Muse des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and discursive essays by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Mansfield, executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, and Clare Grafik, senior curator at The Photographers' Gallery, London.

Reviews

'Lavish' - Observer
'Prager has mastered a film still aesthetic [] that harks back to the Technicolor shockers of Hollywoods golden age' - Christie's
'Prager creates dazzling sets that are meticulously structured, making you look twice at the strangeness, beauty and colour of her world this book brings together the best of her career to date' - New Statesman
'High-glamour, luminous and extremely covetable' - The i Newspaper
'Prager does for photography what James Ellroy did for crime fiction, inventing a neo-noir L.A. vernacular that creates a feeling of the past without the limitations of historical accuracy' - The New Yorker

Author Bio

Alex Prager is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in major international collections, including Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Kunsthaus Zrich, Zurich, Switzerland; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.