THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Nothing in an Alex Prager Photograph Is Real. She Builds All of It Anyway.
In the winter of 1999 a twenty-year-old drummer in a Los Angeles band walked into the J. Paul Getty Museum and saw William Eggleston and the Color Tradition. What stopped her was a photograph of dust-covered brown shoes under a bed. “I had a physical reaction,” Alex Prager later told Filmmaker Magazine, “like I had found meaning in my life.” She had no art training behind her and would acquire none — MoMA’s curators would eventually describe her, flatly, as self-taught — and at the time she could not account for the feeling. “I was really moved by his work,” she said in 2011. “I didn’t really understand why, because I was just looking at something so seemingly ordinary.”
Nothing Prager has made since has been ordinary, and that inversion is the most revealing thing about her. Eggleston found his pictures. Prager builds hers, down to the last object in the frame.
The early series set the vocabulary — Polyester (2007), The Big Valley (2008), Compulsion (2012): women in synthetic wigs and period clothing, lit like a 1962 studio portrait, stranded inside narratives nobody ever explains. It could have been read as pastiche, a Hollywood daydream about Hollywood. MoMA’s New Photography 2010, curated by Roxana Marcoci, took it more seriously, and included her short film Despair, starring Bryce Dallas Howard — the first time film had appeared in that series at all. The year after, The New York Times Magazine commissioned Touch of Evil, a suite of short films with Clooney, Chastain, Gosling, Glenn Close and Brad Pitt. It won a News & Documentary Emmy in 2012.
Then came Face in the Crowd, which turned the method into the subject. Prager took over a Hollywood sound stage and directed between 150 and 200 extras a day for four days, casting, costuming and placing every one of them; the airport concourses and beaches and lobbies were built from nothing and populated by hand. The Corcoran Gallery of Art gave the work her first solo museum exhibition in the United States in November 2013. What reads from across a room as a documentary photograph of a crowd is, at every single point in the frame, a decision somebody made.
That rule has never been broken. Her gallery’s current language states it plainly: every element in the frame “is created practically and captured physically and entirely in-camera.” She storyboards with the artist Joel Venti before a shoot. There is no compositing, no crowd generated in software, no set extended afterward. And the discipline’s origin is not art-historical but professional — as a child Prager acted in an episode of Tales from the Crypt directed by the special-effects artist Kevin Yagher, and she has credited that set, and a two-headed animatronic man on it, with a conviction she has never let go of: that an illusion ought to be a thing you can walk up to and touch. “It’s important for me,” she told Filmmaker, “that in a fictionalized world full of artifice you know that everything you see you can touch, feel and interact with.”
The logic has carried her steadily toward film. The Opéra national de Paris commissioned La Grande Sortie for its 3e scène platform in 2015; Play the Wind (2019) starred Riley Keough; Run (2022), with Katherine Waterston, was the first of her films to play a festival. Her feature debut, Dreamquil — co-written with her sister, the artist Vanessa Prager, and produced by Elizabeth Banks — premiered at SXSW on March 16, 2026, with Banks, John C. Reilly, Juliette Lewis and Sofia Boutella, shot by Lol Crawley, its near-future world built in miniature by Chris and Gene Warren. Reviews were mixed, and split along a telling line: the trades admired the picture-making considerably more than the story.
Which leaves the question of where the photographs go next. Matinee — four large-scale new works with Los Angeles as subject and muse — closed at Lehmann Maupin in New York on August 21, 2026. The gallery framed it as “a prelude to Prager’s solo presentation in New York in 2027, which will coincide with a major museum exhibition by the artist, to be announced in the coming months.” In the meantime she took a commission that ought to be a contradiction: a triptych for Apple, Prospect Avenue Triptych (9:20pm–9:25pm), shot entirely on a phone — and what she praised about the device was how convincingly it simulates the halation of film.
WHY IT MATTERS
Prager gets filed under cinematic photography, which undersells the argument. Her work insists that the artificial and the handmade are not opposites — that a wholly invented image can still be reported from something that physically stood in a room. In a year when the cost of generating a convincing photograph of nothing has fallen to nothing, an artist who builds the nothing first is making a claim about what the medium is for, not choosing a style.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies
Fotografiska Berlin | Berlin
Opens September 26, 2026
Thirty Los Angeles teenagers from ten high schools handed Greenfield their phones: 150 days of filming and more than 2,000 hours of screen recordings — private posts, group chats, drafts, the things sent and deleted. The result fills 5,000 square feet with photographs, wall-scale grids of social feeds, immersive installations and a screening room running all five episodes of the FX documentary series drawn from the same material. Greenfield has spent thirty years photographing American girls arranging themselves in front of mirrors, from Fast Forward to Girl Culture; this is the first body of work she has made from inside the phone, and it treats the device as a studio rather than a symptom. Curated by Greenfield with Trudy Wilner Stack.
Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial
Smithsonian American Art Museum | Washington, DC
September 18, 2026 – April 18, 2027
In 1976 the National Endowment for the Arts funded more than seventy photographic surveys of American places, sending over 200 photographers out to document the country in its two hundredth year; about a thousand of the resulting prints came to the Smithsonian in 1983 and have never been shown together. This exhibition reunites 225 of them, organized by John Jacob with Krystle Stricklin, and the roster is the argument for going — Friedlander, Davidson, Meyerowitz, Klett and Verburg among them. The title comes from Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal,” which is the right register for a project that was commissioned as celebration and came back as something considerably more ambivalent. It opens in the country’s 250th year, which gives the ambivalence a second life.
Nadav Kander: The edge of things
Foam | Amsterdam
September 18, 2026 – January 31, 2027
Four decades of Kander’s work assembled for the first time, guest-curated by David Campany and organized with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography. Kander built his reputation on scale — the Yangtze series, the Chernobyl-adjacent Soviet sites, fifty-two portraits of the incoming Obama administration in a single magazine issue — and the survey’s interest is in showing how consistently the landscape work and the portraits share a temperament: distance held deliberately, weather doing much of the emotional labor. A Thames & Hudson publication accompanies it, and it arrives the same month as Dark Line, his Thames Estuary book from GOST.
Minor White
Fundación MAPFRE, Recoletos Hall | Madrid
September 24, 2026 – January 10, 2027
Fifty years after his death, White gets what Fundación MAPFRE bills as the first major exhibition of his work in Europe, curated by Carlos Gollonet. White is the figure modern photography keeps half-forgetting: co-founder of Aperture, the most influential teacher of his generation, and the photographer who insisted that pictures be read in sequence rather than singly. Several of those sequences are shown in Europe here for the first time, which is the real event — White’s sequences are the part of his work that resists reproduction and has therefore traveled worst.
A Human Pace: Robert Doisneau | Paolo Ventura
Peter Fetterman Gallery | Santa Monica
September 12, 2026 – January 9, 2027
A broad Doisneau career survey — Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, the 1952 Picasso and Françoise Gilot portrait, Jacques Tati in 1949 — hung alongside Paolo Ventura’s constructed tableaux. The pairing is the idea: Doisneau’s most famous pictures were themselves staged, a fact that scandalized people when it emerged and now reads simply as the working method of a photographer who understood that the street rarely performs on schedule. Ventura builds his scenes outright, from paper and paint. Seen together, the distance between the two is smaller than the century between them suggests.
Henry Horenstein: Miles and Miles of Texas
Catherine Couturier Gallery | Houston
September 12 – October 3, 2026
Drawn from Horenstein’s 2025 Honky Tonk Editions book of the same title, this is the Texas end of the country-music work he has been making since the early 1970s — dance halls, roadhouses, the people who filled them on a Saturday night before either the buildings or the audience thinned out. Horenstein went in as a fan rather than a documentarian, which is why the pictures have so little of the condescension that afflicts photography of American vernacular leisure. The gallery is screening his short film Spoke alongside the prints.
WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD
Opening This Week
Denver
Mary Ellen Mark: Indian Circus — Colorado Photographic Arts Center · Opens Sep 25 (her first solo exhibition in Colorado; reception Oct 1)
La Jolla
Declan Haun: Between Fact and Feeling — Joseph Bellows Gallery · Opens Sep 19 (through Oct 31; 24 vintage prints)
London
Daido Moriyama: Ink — Hamiltons Gallery · Sep 15 – Oct 30 (silkscreens, unique or in small editions)
Los Angeles
Katie Shapiro: The Other Side of the Moon — Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory · Opens Sep 26 (photographs printed on glass, set in obsidian and jade; reception 3–5 p.m.)
Maastricht
Eve Arnold: All about Eve — Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof · Sep 19 – Jan 31, 2027 (130 photographs, with Magnum Photos and CAMERA, Turin)
New York
Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives — The Museum of Modern Art · Opens Sep 20 (Marianne Wex with Nona Faustine, K8 Hardy, Wendy Red Star and others; through May 2, 2027)
Lucien Clergue: Written by the Sun — Mouraux Durand-Ruel · Sep 23 – Oct 24 (the gallery’s inaugural show; forty prints, 1950s–2000s)
San Francisco
Power of Mystery: 100 Years — Robert Koch Gallery · Sep 17 – Nov 28 (Sudek, Drtikol, Kertész, Koudelka, Levitt, Webb, Ballen and others)
Toronto
Static and Noise — Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography · Sep 18 – Nov 7 (Aliyah Aziz, Bret Parenteau, Kite, Nathan Ivanco)
Tucson
Lou Peralta: Expanded Portraiture, The Matter of the Invisible / Elizabeth Z. Pineda: MAÍZ — Etherton Gallery · Sep 22 – Nov 28 (with Yu Yu Shiratori in the cases; reception Sep 26)
Closing Soon
Boston
Rania Matar: Where Do I Go? لوين روح — Robert Klein Gallery · Closes Oct 3
London
Bob Carlos Clarke: The Last Dolls — Atlas Gallery · Closes Sep 26
Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Closes Sep 27 (the ICP version opens Oct 15)
Los Angeles
Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018 — Fahey/Klein Gallery · Closes Sep 26
New York
Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28
Photobooks USA 2000–25 — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28
Paris
Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 24
Madeleine de Sinéty — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 24
Daido Moriyama: Lettres d’amour à la photographie — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Closes Oct 4 (pairs with the Hamiltons show above — one photographer, two continents)
Eboro: Nuits Balnéaires — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Closes Oct 4
Ongoing
A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.
Antwerp
Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With — FOMU · Through Jan 17, 2027 (~160 works; originally organized by C/O Berlin)
Berlin
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — C/O Berlin · Through Feb 3, 2027
Chicago
If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground — Museum of Contemporary Photography · Through Dec 19 (Parks, Bey, Weems, Frazier and others)
Los Angeles
Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography — Getty Center · Through Jan 3, 2027 (both Álvarez Bravos, Héctor García, Iturbide, Ortiz Monasterio)
New York
Aperture Loves New York — Aperture · Through Nov 1 (Arbus, Frank, Goldin, Lawson, Weems, Shore)
Tallinn
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work — Fotografiska Tallinn · Through Jan 17, 2027
Toronto
Richard Avedon: Immortal — Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 — The Image Centre · Through Dec 5
FESTIVAL WATCH
FotoFocus Biennial 2026: The Long View — Cincinnati, US · Opening Program Sep 30 – Oct 3, events through October (8th edition; 74 exhibitions at 65 venues, free Biennial Pass; Trevor Paglen, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and the first Nancy Rexroth retrospective)
T3 Photo Festival Tokyo 2026 — Tokyo, Japan · Oct 3 – 26 (city-wide across Yaesu, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi and Ginza)
Click! Photography Festival: The Click! 120 Experience — Durham, North Carolina · Oct 3 – 4 (Durham Convention Center)
Cortona On The Move 2026: Beautiful Country — Cortona, Italy · Through Nov 1
PhotoMidwest Biennial Festival 2026 — Madison, Wisconsin · Sep 17, 2026 – Feb 26, 2027 (14th edition; photographers from 13 Midwest states)
Bristol Photo Festival: TIME MACHINE — Bristol, UK · Opening events from Oct 14 (3rd edition; runs through autumn)
OFF THE PRESS
Papyrus by Jessica Backhaus
Kehrer Verlag
Papyrus, released September 2 and Backhaus’s tenth book with Kehrer, is a tribute to paper as one of the oldest surfaces humans used to hold a thought. Backhaus has been moving toward abstraction for years — arranging colored paper, light and shadow into compositions that read as photographs of nothing in particular and turn out to be photographs of attention — and this is the furthest she has taken it. The conceit is that papyrus was the first medium of inscription, and that a photograph of folded, lit, torn paper is an inscription too: communication without words. Stiff softcover, 168 pages, 75 color plates, with texts by Sophie-Charlotte Opitz and Andrei Zavadski and a design by Hannah Feldmeier.
Catching the Tide: Salmon Net Fishing in Scotland by Colin McPherson
Dewi Lewis Publishing
For thirty years McPherson photographed the men who caught salmon and sea trout off the Scottish coast with traditional nets and traps, under laws written in the nineteenth century and worked to the rhythm of the tides. By the mid-1990s a mix of economic and environmental pressure had put the industry into steep decline, which turned a documentary project into a race — McPherson was photographing the last generation to do the work at all, and he knew it. A founding member of the Document Scotland collective, he covered the story across three decades for the Independent, the Guardian and the Times; the book is the long-form version those assignments never had room for.
Drag Queens by Martin Schoeller
Steidl
Schoeller built a career on a single unforgiving format: the head-on close-up, flat light, no context, every pore available. He has applied it to presidents, prisoners, Olympians and the Hadza of Tanzania, and the method’s whole argument is that it flattens status — everyone gets the same lighting. Turning it on drag performers is the sharpest test he has set himself, because drag is an art of constructed distance and Schoeller’s camera is built to close it. The book collects 82 portraits across 176 pages of a subculture that has moved from the margins to prime-time television, and asks what the face is doing behind an art form organized around the face.
OPEN CALLS
F/262 Photo Book Award 2026 — Sep 30 · Caldas da Rainha, Portugal · €35 per project; unpublished photobook projects, open internationally
2026 CPA International Juried Exhibition — Oct 1, 11:59 p.m. MDT · Center for Photographic Art, Carmel · $45 members / $65 non-members for three images; any still photographic medium, no theme, 18+
The Photobook From Start to Finish — Oct 6 · Penumbra Foundation with Image Threads Collective, New York · $75 application fee; a one-year program covering every stage of making a photobook
30th Luis Valtueña International Humanitarian Photography Award — Oct 11, 23:59 GMT+2 · Médicos del Mundo, Spain · €12,000 total prize fund, €6,000 first prize
Howard Chapnick Grant 2026 — Oct 12, 11:59 p.m. EDT · W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund · $7,500 for programs rather than individuals, advancing documentary photography; $25 voluntary donation
LensCulture Black & White Photography Awards 2026 — Oct 14 · free for a single image, $35 for five or more singles, $45 for a series · $10,000 in cash awards plus a London exhibition during Photo London 2027
PhMuseum 2026 Women Photographers Grant — Oct 15 (early-bird Sep 24) · $35 early / $40 regular · 10th edition; open to female and non-binary photographers of all ages and nationalities
Les Mesnographies 2026: The Pursuit of Happiness — Oct 15 · Les Mesnuls, France · 7th edition of the open-air festival
Wellcome Photography Prize 2026 — Oct 21 · Wellcome, London · up to £10,000; images exploring urgent health challenges and scientific discovery
Environmental Photography Award 2027 — Nov 1, 23:59 CET · Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, via Photocrowd · five categories, 36 photographs selected
ON THIS DAY
September 24, 1977 — Pictures opens at Artists Space, New York.
Organized by the critic Douglas Crimp and running through October 29, Pictures showed five artists — Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith — whose work was built from imagery they had not made themselves. The show was small and its immediate audience was smaller, but Crimp’s catalogue essay, expanded two years later in October, gave the tendency its name and its argument: that the photographic image had become the culture’s raw material, and that the artist’s job was now selection rather than production. Almost every subsequent fight about authorship, appropriation and the copyright of a photograph runs back through this room. Artists Space
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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