John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.Combining early and late work, John Stezaker’s first solo show in almost a decade revealed how effectively his intimate photographs reenergize the modernist fascination with an urban uncanny. Presented in a freestanding display case were examples from his “Third Person Archive,” which was begun in 1976. Here Stezaker, who was born in 1949, presents enlargements of human figures from John Hammerton’s 1920s encyclopedia, Countries of the World. As if in homage to a forgotten flaneur, these grainy, surveillancelike works invite us to engage with images remote from our present. Contemporary with early Surrealism, the people in Countries of the World remind Stezaker of the somnambulant anonymous types in paintings by de Chirico, Delvaux and Magritte. Begun as a limited series for book publication, the collection has grown to suggest an infinitely expandable archive.

Along the walls of the gallery were examples from the disorienting “City” series (2000-04). Barely larger than postcards, these found-image collages either invert a single urban image or horizontally bisect one cityscape with the upturned photograph of another, and have been carefully glued in place to maximize disequilibrium.Stezaker’s simple yet disconcerting modifications toy with the subconscious and the surreal. His permutations produce a ‘moment of revelation within the universal blindness that the consumption of images has become: a glimmer of consciousness within the unconsciousness of image reception’* In ‘Blind’, one incision monstrously removes the eyes of the subject completely. The ‘Masks’ continue Stezaker’s ongoing interest with the hidden face. Found postcard images obscure and replace the subject’s physiognomy, leaving a ’surround’ of hair, neck and clothes.In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny.




By: Saatchi-gallery