The best art writing is, simply put, honest commercial copywriting.
Like this amazing Lavazza calendar for the coming year.
I never thought about how art, photography and film of the 60s and 70s of the 20th Century appear so attractive and intriguing to at least part of the younger creative generation of the 21st Century. There’s a nostalgia for the unknown in this mood toward the baby boomers. Old times seem to be better than now and the future prospectives. But, on the other hand, this mood contrasts loudly with the new political awakening. Puzzling.
There’s a place where people come together spontaneously, and where everyone is welcome: the café. Welcoming by nature and open for use by all, cafés are the perfect place to meet, where all humanity is well represented.
The patrons are not only customers: they are also actors, all playing the lead characters in their own stories.
In 30 years of the Lavazza Calendar, we’ve told, in fact, everyone’s stories.
From 1993 to 2023, we have blended dreams and reality around a cup of coffee.
For Lavazza, cafés are also the metaphor for an ideal world, where all individuals can be themselves and feel at home.
With this edition signed by Alex Prager and with “YES! We’re OPEN!”, we want to reiterate our freedom of thought and expression, and remind everyone that we at Lavazza are just this: open since 1895.Francesca Lavazza
“First known for perfect artifice — staged, Cindy Shermanesque photographs that resemble hyper-exquisite, color-saturated movie stills — Alex Prager now tackles imperfect artifice. Her latest photographs are large, meticulously staged crowd scenes of seemingly ordinary people who never quite blend into a crowd. They owe a great deal to the staged images of Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall, but have no truck with ambiguity. Instead, they are ostentatiously fake. The hollowness of her work is more apparent, but also creepier, which is an achievement of sorts.”
Roberta Smith — ‘Face in the Crowd’. The New York Times
Feb. 20, 2014
Born in 1979 in Los Angeles, California, lives and works in the U.S.
Alex Prager is a self-taught American photographer. Her nomadic upbringing saw her splitting time between Florida, California and Switzerland without truly settling down long enough for a formal education. Prager’s interest in art began in her adolescence, but it was in her early twenties that she began to focus on photography after being inspired by the work of William Eggleston.
She is a photographer who staged sets and models to create “film-like” images that invite myriad references, not only to the history of Hollywood and photography but also the cinematic image in art contexts. The subjects of her works, exaggerated and costumed, sometimes “hyper-real” speak to the ambiguity of seduction and spectacle.
Alex Prager is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
@alexprager
c blog 
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