John Stezaker

John Stezaker is one of the most distinguished voices in the history of image-based collage. Since the 1970s Stezaker?s work has occupied a unique position in the face of radical changes in the economy of popular visual culture and its implications on the value of ?found? imagery in art. Faced with the post-conceptual crisis of the mid-1970s, Stezaker came to reject the prevailing tendency among his British contemporaries towards agitprop photomontage, promoted in the name of punk, anarchism and second-wave feminism. He also positioned himself at a distance from the North American Pictures Generation artists with whom he had a meaningful exchange during this period, and in whose narrative he remains something of a missing link to this day. Stezaker was gradually to become consumed by a different enquiry altogether ? one that was, and remains, invested in the possibility of reviving the mechanically reproduced image and exploring its potentials as an outmoded visual currency that is shifting out of circulation in favour of new technologies and alternative modes of image distribution.00Exhibition: Luxembourg + Co., London, UK (01.10 - 05.12.2020).

John Stezaker's found images, collages and image fragments are most associated with cinematic imagery, however it is the other found-image sources which he has worked with over the past 30 years which is the focus of this publication; notably the artist's Bridge collages and the anatomical nudes of his 'Falland Expulsion' series. This catalogue, published in association with Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, which showed the exhibition 'John Stezaker: The Nude and Landscape' in October 2011, centres on Stezaker's works from the 1980s when he switched from the cinematic imagery of the 1970s towards 'an engagement with the culture of the image to the nature of the image'. The catalogue presents many new works that have not been shown before and, interestingly, also unaltered found images so similar to the Stezaker collages that they are only identifiable when focussing on the absence or presence of the artist's cut.0Exhibition: Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, USA.

John Stezaker has been collecting photographic city views from the 1920s and 1930s for 30 years. His interest lies in the people that were usually photographed by chance. In his The 3rd Person Archive, he records hundreds of mostly stamp-size details. He describes the archive as a possibility to travel in time. For the viewer, these "miniatures", four-colour reproductions of the black-and-white originals, unfold an enormous imaginative power. One feels like a voyeur observing, in an uninvolved way, the fates and encounters of people in urban labyrinths, a surreal situation that is as disconcerting as it is fascinating. No text.

The art of John Stezaker engages with the ceaseless flow of images that has been a consequence of mechanical reproduction, mass media and popular culture. His intervention into these images through collage, excision, reconfiguration, inversion or occlusion can be seen to interrupt their everyday circulation in a profound way: image and perception alike are questioned, rearranged and opened to new possibilities. Through their transformation Stezaker's images acquire poetic resonance, and, in many cases, a disquieting allure. With over 120 illustrations, this monograph presents the first overview of John Stezaker's work on paper from the 1970s onwards, featuring his found images, collages, image fragments and a selection from The 3rd Person Archive. Essays by Dawn Ades and Michael Bracewell, as well as a conversation between the artist and curators Daniel F. Herrmann and Christophe Gallois, place Stezaker's work in a historical context and analyse his methodology and practice. The exhibition opens at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in January 2011 and travels to the MUDAM, Luxembourg at the end of the year (June - September 2011). It will also show at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis, USA (January - April 2012);

Reframing image fragments from postcards, John Stezaker's series Crossing Over (2012-13) focuses on the incidental micro-narratives of life that are often overlooked in these everyday objects.Celebrated British artist John Stezaker is widely known for his innovative approach to found photographic imagery. Building upon the corresponding 3rd Person Archive series, the image fragments in this volume span the history of postcard production.Moving from the Victorian era to the postwar period and black and white to colour imagery, Stezaker explores the female figure, notions of return and crossing back.Working with notions of time and memory, Crossing Over frames seemingly minor details, such as the figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves.Reprinted to full-scale, 65 image fragments in this artist project is collected for the first time here.

Foreword by Janneke de Vries. Text by Barry Schwabsky, David Lillington, William Horner.

In 'Handbook of the Spontaneous Other', Aikaterini Gegisian brings together a diverse range of found photographic material produced in Western Europe and the USA during the 1960s and 1970s. Composed of a series of 59 collages, the book playfully recontextualises images from popular culture that Gegisian has sourced from pornographic magazines, tourist catalogues and National Geographic spreads in order to subvert the way that the body, nature and pleasure have been represented in Western capitalist fantasies. Divided into nine chapters that follow a metaphysical narrative of colour and sensation, the book ultimately seeks to locate a 'spontaneous other'; a notion of the self and of pleasure that exists beyond the confines of popular culture and its dominant modes of representation.