11:45 pm, Griffith Park & Eye #4 (Roadside Victim),
Alex Prager
American, born 1979
2012
A staged color photograph presented as two inkjet prints that recreates a night‑time roadside accident as a hyper‑cinematic tableau, paired with a separate close‑up of an eye to feel like a scripted moment of melodrama captured on film.
The large scene looks like a movie freeze‑frame—thick smoke, harsh headlight glow, a woman cradling a fallen figure on a dark road with a coyote and a lattice of power lines at the margins—while the smaller print arrests you with a lacquered, oversized eye, all rendered in saturated, theatrical color.
Prager fuses cinema, fashion and staged tableau photography to show how modern visual culture constructs suspense and spectacle, reviving Hollywood melodrama and theatrical artificiality within contemporary photographic practice.
Medium
Inkjet prints (diptych)
Dimensions
47 7/8 × 63" (121.6 × 160 cm) and 19 7/8 × 22 7/8" (50.5 × 58.1 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Arthur and Susan Fleischer
Accession
566.2021.a-b
Palette
Exhibitions
