My chosen cultural text

Barbara by Alex Prager 2010

After deciding to use work by Alex Prager, I still hadn't selected the individual piece, and was very keen to use Despair (2010) a short film featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. However I was swayed towards this one, entitled Barbara and part of the exhibition Weekend, after relating it to a critical discourse. I have come to realise that Alex Prager would be perfect to analyse in relation to Intertextuality, and I want to talk about this photograph in particular as it's a great example of how she uses other people's work to fuel her own, whilst being itself a very simplistic frame. Ordinarily her photographs involve a large set and very elaborate staging, whereas here  there are very few elements, a simple portrait. Yet we feel the same sense of tension, drama and intrigue, it is startlingly cinematic and references to Crewdson, Hitchcock and Sirk are as strong as ever. The image being more stripped back that most of her work will allow me to analyse each aspect in more detail, and try to understand how those connections to others are made. It is even more interesting to see how inescapably tied in to a culture the image can be there's hardly anything in the shot. How could a straightforward portrait of a woman in front of a blue background possibly reference so many others?