I am a huge fan of Alex Prager, the 32-year old native of Los Angeles. I fell in love with her after seeing this photo at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009.

In 2010, Prager started doing films and so I thought I would share  “Despair” which features Bryce Dallas Howard.

In general, I adore that Prager can make her heroines look both beautiful and horrified, vintage and contemporary and I love that her use of color over saturation seems to point to an emotional intensity instead of a simple caricature. Her ambiguous narrative structures reminds me very much of Cindy Sherman’s works but where Prager deviates is her ability to integrate her heroines into more complex settings with additional characters while still feeling the magnitude of the central character’s persona.

That, and I think she’s cool.

Here is “Despair”