Silver Rocket:Alex Prager at the Photographer's Gallery.

"You got it, yeah, ride the silver rocket" - Silver Rocket, Sonic Youth.

There's no real link to photographer Alex Prager and the band Sonic Youth but there is a rocket in one of her photographs and her recent exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery was called Silver Lake Drive so I just couldn't resist. Silver Lake, more likely, refers to the part of Los Angeles where my friends Owen and Annasivia used to live.

It's nice. I liked it round there. I don't know if that's where Alex Prager comes from, or is based, but I do know that LA is her hometown and in her sunlit saturated, meticulously curated, photographs this comes through abundantly. There's something of the Andreas Gursky, the Jeff Wall about Prager's work but it's also imbued with a kind of Hollywood dreaming. It's no coincidence that Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk are cited as influences as regularly as Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, or William Eggleston.

Desiree (2008)

Julie (2007)

As with Gregory Crewdson, Prager's work appears initially to be a realistic portrayal of events but closer inspection reveals it to be hyper-stylised, using elaborate stage sets to create scenarios that look both familiar and wholly articulate at the same time. Occasionally casts, and film crews in the hundreds, are employed to flesh our Prager's vision. I don't know where she gets the money from.

Works like Desiree and Julie remind me of Lana Del Rey's Lynchian take on Americana. All those crisp pastel coloured skirts and dresses somehow failing to obscure the subject's overwhelming ennui as they slowly die from the inside out in their gilded cages. Yes, folks, we're in the company of our old and familiar friend, the seedy underbelly.

Four Girls (2007)

Susie and Friends (2008)

Riffs upon pop culture, and even fairly direct lifts, abound. Susie and Friends could be a still from some EDM video if transported back into the 70s/80s and there's no prizes for guessing which Hitchcock film springs to mind when looking at 2008's Eve. I even wondered if the model's face was intentionally obscured so our minds conjured up Tippi Hedren. 

The Four Girls in their bikins, mostly turned away from us, seem to be plotting something, as we fear the beautiful people always are, but our eyes are drawn to the top of the picture and a remote aircraft flying over the scene. These are stories with no beginning, no middle, and no end but they are stories. Outlines at least of stories we can write ourselves.

Eve (2008)

Crowd #9 (Sunset Five) (2013)

Prager's Crowd scenes, as with most crowd scenes these days, run the risk of falling into Where's Wally? territory but they're still intriguing. Sunset Five sees a crowd at a ball game eating snacks, watching the action, passive spectators at an athletic event in which many of them would, judging by their expanding waistbands, not be fit to play.

At least at the beach and at the airport we are participants in our own personal dramas. Pelican Beach sees all the tropes of beach life laid out, beachballs, blankets, tan lines, a man on a deck chair chugging a brew, and at Bob Hope Airport our eyes are drawn to the central protagonist. The red haired lady caught up in our own confusion as everyone else goes on about their lives around her.

Crowd #3 (Pelican Beach) (2013)

Crowd #7 (Bob Hope Airport) (2013)

These photos are pleasant to look at, they're masterfully staged, and you can only take your hat off to Prager for making them but I must confess they leave me a little cold. I don't really engage with them in any way other than a curious outsider. That's what I am, sure, but maybe art, and photography, could sometimes offer an olive branch to the viewer. Meet us halfway. Otherwise it comes across as what many suspect it to be. A lofty, haughty pursuit only open to a certain in crowd who have been given the keys and shibboleths required to open the doors to the art world. Art should be for all and, with Prager's photography, the jury is out on that.

With her films, however, it's a no from me. There are two of them and each one is, despite the huge amount of people involved in making them, just a little dull. 2013's Face in the Crowd, starring Elizabeth Banks from The Hunger Games (which I've never seen, nor particularly wanted to), is probably the more memorable and interesting of the two. A three channel installation that features a series of not particularly enlightening confessional monologues from a variety of characters before we get to see Banks herself wander around the liminal spaces of airports and the like. She's got a lovely white blouse on but if that's the main thing one remembers about it then that's probably not good enough.

Still, the twelve minutes of my life I won't get back from that film still feel less wasted than the ten lost to 2016's Le Grande Sortie which is, quite frankly, a load of old wank. Commissioned by Opera Bastille in Paris it shows prima ballerina Emilie Cozette dancing to a score that Radiohead, Beck, and Natalie Imbruglia producer Nigel Godrich sampled from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and is said to be influenced by Powell and Pressburger's 1948 The Red Shoes. The fact that a photograph of some paving slabs in a shopping plaza moves me more tells you all you need to know about this exercise in navel gazing.

Shopping Plaza 2 (2015)

Eye #2 (Boulder) (2012)

Eye #3 (House Fire) (2012)

Eye #5 (Automobile Accident) (2012)

Eye #9 (Passenger Casualties) (2012)

The photos of eyes were on a par with Shopping Plaza 2, diverting if no more, but things improved with a series of photos taken, or staged presumably, on one hot California day. A day so hot that houses catch fire and a day so weird that boulders appear in roads and women hang from cars suspended in mid air as birds fly by.

It showed far more imagination than anything else in the show and I would probably have been happier to see an entire exhibition based on this series and skip the films entirely. What it means I've no idea, but in building up her own vision of the world, rather than someone else's, Prager seems to have found a way out of the cul-de-sac of unoriginality much of her photography has ended up parked in.

4:01pm, Sun Valley (2012)

1:18pm, Silverlake Drive (2012)

3:14pm, Pacific Ocean (2012)

3:32pm, Coldwater Canyon (2012)

Anaheim (2017)

Which is a shame. There's undoubted talent at work here. Anaheim and Suni Valley catch something of the American dream and the American nightmare at the same time and, undoubtedly, there is a lot to be said about that right now.

Technically a very proficient photographer, I'd personally like to see her embrace story telling and politics in her work a little more. But then she's the one with an exhibition, and possibly the money from it, burning a hole in her pocket and I'm the almost skint observer pressing my nose up against the windows of the art world and having to pay £4 to wear a little blue circular sticker so that I can wander round looking at the work.

So what do I know?

Suni Valley (2014)