She cites this as a formative experience: “I felt like I was struck blind by a vision and that was the path I was going to take for the rest of my life.” A self-taught artist, Prager avoided formal art education and instead purchased a Nikon N90s camera and printed photographs in a home darkroom.

[7][8][9] Prager’s work is characterized by distinctive mise-en-scène, ambiguous and open-ended narratives, highly staged scenes, unique characters, timeless costumes, and saturated colors.

All elements of the images are practical and shot in-camera, and she has said “it’s important [to her] that you could theoretically touch anything you see in the frame.” [13] Prager’s early series, Polyester (2007), The Big Valley (2008), and Week-End (2009), are defined by portraits featuring female protagonists against a Los Angeles backdrop.

[15] Prager’s first short film, "Despair" (2010) starring Bryce Dallas Howard, was included in the New Photography 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, alongside her photographs, which was a breakthrough in her career.

[29][30] In 2019, Prager completed and exhibited her most autobiographical body of work to date, which included photographs and a new short film, "Play the Wind" with Dimitri Chamblas and Riley Keough.

Inspired to examine the complicated emotional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Prager created a more simple and intimate series of Americana portraits capturing her fictional subjects in the midst of intense inner turmoil.

[37][38][39] Continuing to explore the anxiety and responses of living through uncertain times, Prager followed with a new short film starring Katherine Waterson and an accompanying series of images for Part Two: Run in 2022.

Emily Witt, a journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote “Prager does for photography what James Ellroy did for crime fiction, inventing a neo-noir L.A. vernacular that creates a feeling of the past without the limitations of historical accuracy.” [6] Michael Govan, the director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art has said that Prager's photographic and filmic compositions, like Eggleston's photographs, Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Edward Hopper's paintings, reveal the extraordinary lurking within the ordinary.

Wreaking havoc with our involuntary voyeurism and our tendency to leap to conclusions about people's characters based on the merest details of their appearances, Prager cues our own fantasies by representing her own.

She wields a camera and a director’s chair with equal strength, and creates both motion pictures and photographs in full view of their commercial influences and the complex politics of art-house avant-garde cinema.

[51][41] Art historian and curator William J Simmons wroteWe might then connect Prager’s crowds to democratic studies of class and labor, like August Sander’s Face of our Time (1929) and Irving Penn’s Small Trades (1950–51) .

Prager’s contemporary crowds, filled with markers of class, gender, occupation, and privilege (or lack thereof), absorb and require us to consider the very real ramifications of collectivity and estrangement.