Alex Prager –Compulsions

The self-taught photographer Alex Prager is back with her new series Compulsion and a short film La Petite Mort. They offer a photographic plunge into the glorious world of American cinema. There’s something Hitchcockian about Alex Prager. Her images don’t move, but they are imbued with the director’s signature atmosphere, deftly manipulating tension, suspense and humor while exploring the recurrent theme of the “wrong man.” With her usual cinematic aesthetic, the American photographer examines in Compulsion the relationship between events and narrative through the intervention of the eye. As in her previous series, Prager imagines small melodramatic scenes where characters clamber for a way out of a situation that’s getting worse by the minute. Men, but especially women, appear caught in a web of electric wires, straddling a high-voltage transmission tower, drowning in green water or trying to survive a car accident. Sometimes Prager’s friends find themselves before her lens, as does her hometown of Los Angeles, where she imagines these elaborately staged digital images that evoke our inability to foresee a coming danger. However, to give her series rhythm, Prager also had to find close-ups of eyes, which can look at the other images or rest a compulsive gaze on the viewer. They could just as easily be Alex Prager’s eyes as our own. Golden eyes, disturbed and intrigued, if not intriguing. In Compulsion, it’s impossible not to wonder what happened just before the picture was taken, or what came after. Naturally imbued with cinematic intrigue, Prager manipulates not only still images but moving ones, too. A new short film, La Petite Mort, accompanies her photographs and will be released later this month. The film shows the French actress Judith Godrèche experimenting with the links between orgasm and death. Jonas Cuénin Alex Prager, Compulsion and images from the short film La Petite Mort Until May 19, 2012 Yancey Richardson Gallery 535 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 (646) 230-9610