Iconic Hollywood style, candid street photography and cinematic staging all form part of the dramaturgy of LA-born photographer Alex Prager's work. The characters in each constructed scene are frozen by a nebulous mix of fear, love, shock and awe. Prager then uses these unsettling emotional undercurrents to belie the pastel-toned, American Dream aesthetic of her work. “I'm interested in combining the worlds of the extraordinary and the mundane” "I'm interested in combining the worlds of the extraordinary and the mundane, then living in the middle of those two places," says Prager. "When looking at my work are people seeing something fantastical and artificial or real and raw that reflects who they are as a human?" From the blonde ingénue to the distraught femme fatale, Prager’s faux film still opus reverberates with classic Hitchcock heroines. The photographer's meticulous staging of every technicolor scene enables her to turn tragedy into a spectacle. -NOWNESS