John Stezaker: Unassisted Readymade

John Stezaker’s work reexamines 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. In this new book, he started with found imagesresorting stylistically to Hollywoods golden erawhich find a new life on these pages, as much as a new meaning, if not aura.

As photography critic and curator David Campany writes in his essay: “His is an art that returns seemingly banal imagery to its essential freedom. … in working to set loose the most enchained of images, Stezaker’s work offers the viewer an occasion, at least, to experience what image freedom might feel like, what it might imply, and what it tells us about the fears that bind images and the desires that loosen them.”