Theatrical staging, high-drama and luxurious technicolour – photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager’s large-scale photographs feature ensemble casts that teeter between reality and artifice. 

In this intimate series classic American archetypes are presented in the cinematic colour palette of a Hollywood Western. A cowboy, a cherub, an air stewardess, all frozen, suspended mid-air. Artefacts of modern American life seem to float  – or fall – alongside them.

Part One: The Mountain at London’s Lehmann Maupin gallery continues her exploration of the hyperreal. The series was created as a response to the last two years and the effects of the pandemic. Prager’s meticulously constructed characters are paired with details from the character’s backstories – casino chips, prozac and a pair of high heels capture our human idiosyncrasies. 

Prager plays on the tradition of classical portraiture as a way to encourage people to really look at one another again. After such a long period of isolation and polarisation, she works to flatten people out and then hone in on our emotional states. These questions are infused into each portrait, creating a spiritual death and consequently – rebirth. Shot in her hometown of Los Angeles, The Mountain draws on the themes of revelation, pilgrimage, achievement, and adversity. 

Alex Prager’s Part One: The Mountain is at London’s Lehmann Maupin gallery until March 5 2022.