" Alex Prager's images remind us of the extent to which contemporary photography is occupied with capturing pre–existing reality. Prager, on the other hand, creates her own heightened, dreamlike world, a psychic terrain in thrall to the fashions of 50 years ago, where an ever–present sense of threat carries dark, erotic undertones. Imagine Mad Men's Christina Hendricks at large in a hyperreal retro California directed by Alfred Hitchcock and you'll start to get the feel for Prager's signature style.
Yet she prides herself on the fact that just about everything in her pictures has actually happened. "I take stories I've sucked in through the media," she says, from her studio in Los Angeles, "and I restage them in a bright, colourful, slightly comedic world that doesn't exist"
If comedic isn't the first word that springs to mind when looking at Prager's images of people drowned and electrocuted and houses burning, there's a sense, as in the films of Hitchcock, who she has referenced in a tribute to The Birds, that these pictures aren't to be taken entirely at face value.
"Hitchcock shows you dark and heavy subjects, but in an intense and beautiful way. You keep on looking, because you want to stay in his world. I take subjects that would be hard to look at if you showed them as they actually are, and I treat them in a playful, soft–edged way."
Her fascination with the style of the late Fifties and early Sixties – with the little down–tilted trilby hats, the full skirts and skimpy cardigans that recur in her work – goes back to childhood. "I've always shopped in second–hand shops and I've always loved that period," she says. When a friend of her grandmother, a former starlet, gave her boxes of clothes from that era, she began using them in her pictures. "
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