Alex Prager’s Most Cinematic Work Yet Was Shot Entirely on an iPhone

For Alex Prager, the neon was the problem. The artist was on a Los Angeles soundstage directing a crowd scene—replete with fog rolling in, confetti drifting to the floor, and neon signs buzzing overhead—but the iPhone 18 Pro she was shooting with kept flattening the thing that mattered most to her. “The neon doesn’t look right,” she told Apple’s chief aesthetics scientist, Pamela Chen, who was on set to troubleshoot. “And then Pamela was like, ‘I got you. I literally just invented this.’”

What Chen had invented, exactly, was a way to reproduce halation—the soft, sizzly red glow that blooms around a birthday candle in an old snapshot (and an artifact of light bouncing back through film stock), she explained to W at the preview of “What Holds Us,” Apple’s new exhibition of work shot entirely on the new iPhone 18 Pro.

Chen’s team had spent the past year reverse-engineering what gives film its feel, features the new phone seamlessly reproduces for modern users. “We went so far back in the history [of photography],” Chen said. “We studied what makes film film. Most people know about grain, but there are so many other properties.” Halation is now one of several texture controls in the phone’s new Photographic Styles feature. And on set, it gave Prager her neon buzz.

The resulting images anchor “What Holds Us,” for which Apple enlisted the powerhouse photography trio of Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin. Kathy Ryan, the former longtime director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, curated the show. Davison, known for his high-contrast portraiture, shot a series of tactile close-ups of hands working clay in a former sugar warehouse in London, while Chin photographed climber Conrad Anker in the Bugaboo range of British Columbia, in winds hitting 70 miles per hour. (Both Prager and Davison are W alumni—Prager photographed Cate Blanchett for her 2018 cover and cast her in an accompanying short film, and Davison shot Zendaya for her 2022 cover story as conceptualized by Dune director Denis Villeneuve.)

Prager’s contribution to the exhibition includes a soaring, vertical triptych of a crowd in the aftermath of a celebration. She wanted to capture the liminal moment a party ends, “a more relaxed, poetic sort of moment” when everyone turns inward while still surrounded by people. “I wanted to create this aspect ratio that felt very different for me,” Prager said. “I’ve never done this before, where it’s a large vertical. Normally I go the other way, but [shooting with] an iPhone and this new technology, and the way that we see images these days, I wanted to.”

Because the new iPhone captures a continuous stream rather than a single frame, shooting began to feel closer to directing for Prager. “You get the best of both worlds, because it's like you’re seeing it in motion, and then when you make the decisive moment to take the picture, it’s all there for you to observe,” she said. It also made things feel a bit existential. “The more technologically advanced they get,” she said of the new phone’s cameras, “the closer to this organic sense of how we experience the world we are.”

“What Holds Us” is on view in New York September 18 through 20, and travels to London and Shanghai in the coming months. Below, a selection of works from the show: