Alex Prager: La Petite Mort

French actress Judith Godrèche’s Hitchcockian heroine faces an imminent tragic demise in these ominous scenes from Alex Prager’s La Petite Mort, a surreal exploration of sexual ecstasy and mortality. “They say that orgasm is the one time in life you are closest to death because all your senses but one shut down. I really liked that poetic way of describing it,” explains Los Angeles-based Prager, a self-taught photographer and director whose recent work includes a celebrity series for The New York Times and a fantastical short for Mercedes Benz starring Lara Stone. La Petite Mort is showing as part of Compulsion, Prager’s latest exhibition that will run simultaneously at three galleries: New York’s Yancey Richardson Gallery, M+B Los Angeles and Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. Referring to the morbid impulse to treat tragedy as a spectator sport, the show interrogates the viewer’s passive complicity with pictures that mix extreme close-ups of melodramatic eyes with cinematic tableaux reflecting media coverage of natural disasters and premeditated violence. Says Prager: “I did not want to draw from specific events, but it was a way for me to deal with the hopelessness I was feeling about the world. Creating a parallel universe where tragedies happen but with a sense of lightness as well.”