John Stezaker is a British artist working with "...classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning.By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.
His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention
This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning." (Whitechapel Gallery Press Release)
Stezaker's facial collages are similar to my 'photographic collages' as they are combining facial identities from at least two people to create a new face and a new identity. The difference to my works is that my images aren't traditional collages, they are 'photographic collages', they haven't been physically altered after the photo has been taken. They other difference is that in my work I change either the eyes, nose or mouth but as a whole; Stezaker changes parts of these features, like one eye, part of the mouth, half the nose etc. This makes the face less recognizable as a whole entity, it is more disjointed and fragmented than the faces in my work.I could perhaps experiment with maybe using parts of a face vertically rather than horizontally and see how this works for creating a new gendered identity.
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