Capturing “inner turmoil”: Alex Prager opens up about her startling new portrait series
“I don’t want to say [the series] was inspired by the pandemic. It wasn’t, it was inspired by my reaction to everything that was going on; all the inner turmoil. Seeing people who were friends no longer speaking – the communication and love for one another has gone really wonky and it’s sad. So a lot of it has to do with that, and just wanting people to start seeing each other again.
“Since I discovered film I’ve always leaned towards bigger projects, always trying to get uncomfortable with size. Somebody that loves me said it should say ‘an embarrassment of big ideas’ on my tombstone – that kind of sums me up. It took a lot for me to realise that this was the right series. But there’s something so complex in portraiture that it actually became just as challenging as the ones that seem much bigger.
“I looked to classical portraiture as a way to put people in front of you because just by seeing one another, we can raise our understanding for each other a little bit. I looked towards August Sander’sseries – those were the catapults into this.Photography by Alex Prager. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul,] felt like the future, the unknown.
, which grounds you in the physical. It’s the same complicated feelings, but in this endless tunnel that we’ve all felt. Like Dr Seuss’s waiting room from, one of my favourite books. That waiting room is really what it felt like: this unknowable place that we don’t know how to get out of. “The use of archetypes was important, because it felt like everyone was so dispirited and polarised. By using familiar figures that’ve been used in storytelling for centuries, it immediately helps people to connect. It grounds them in something they already feel like they know before they start wrapping their heads around what they’re looking at.”
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