Why not familiarize yourself with Alex Prager by reading our interview with her? I recently touched based with Alex again to discuss her most recent series of photos, Week-end, which opens this weekend at M+B in Los Angeles. Keep reading to find out what Alex Prager does on her Week-end, and to see more photos from the exhibition.

How have you been? What have you been up to since we last spoke?
I’ve been really good. I just opened the show in New York, and I think that went pretty well. I’m about to do a bunch of shoots for my show in London coming up in June so I’ve been doing quite a bit of pre-production for that.

What’s the idea behind Week-end? What inspired it? You mentioned it was going in a slightly different direction during our interview.
With Week-end, I’ve tried to keep the drama of old California in the pictures, but to make the characters more fragile, more real, and the idea that all women are actresses to some degree. Women sometimes will start dramatizing something to get attention, and in the midst of the drama, forget that they created it to begin with. That’s kind of the inspiration for Week-end – documenting a pretend world that became more real than the world they live in.

The photos seem to have a darker quality as well. Darker colors, night-time shots, vastness, emptiness, etc. What’s the reason behind that?
I kept everything a lot darker because I felt that the photos had a heavier feel to them. Like the girls were no longer play-acting. The girls felt really lost to me. Thus, all the endless night skies and closed eyes, etc.

Does this series include more group photos, like you were toying with?
No. I wanted to do more group photos when I started, but it didn’t turn out that way once I edited for the show.

Did anything fun or crazy happen while you were working on these shots?
The shot of the car sinking in the water that was probably the most produced out of all my shots because I actually had to sink this real car. That was pretty crazy. I had to get permits and everything (which normally I don’t bother to do) and I had a huge crew of people, whereas normally my crews are about 3 or 4 people tops. Then, once we got the car in the water, it kept flipping because I wanted it at a certain angle, and it was being held up by inflatables that weren’t very steady in the water. It was pretty amazing that we get the shot in the end because it was looking kind of bleak there for a bit.

Finally, what’s a typical weekend like for you?
A typical weekend is taking my dog to the dog park around the corner from where I live. He’s a rescue named Jake, and he looks like he wears a toupee.

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