Alex Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles) is a self-taught photographer whose style is heavily influenced by film, particularly melodramas of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and directors such as Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. In some works Prager seems to advertently reference, or even recreate specific characters in films. For example, in “Julie” (2007) the subject’s blond hair and styling, as well as the bird flying overhead are clearly references to Tippi Hedren’s famous performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

Prager depicts her subjects in the midst of an action, and her work has been said described as resembling movie stills. She amplifies the emotions in her photographs through the subject’s expression and through dramatic lighting, angles and colors. Prager has also experimented with film; in 2010 she debuted her four-minute film entitled “Despair”, which starred Bryce Dallas Howard, at MoMA in the “New Photography 2010” exhibit. As Prager describes her films, they “show the before, now and after of…my images.”