John Stezaker is not a photographer in a conventional sense, but his use of the medium is by far the most perceptive of anyone working today. He functions covertly, like an archivist in the unconscious pathways that images lay bare, forging connections that trouble and beguile. Photography is a medium that conceals, even as it appears to show us everything and Stezaker brings that quality of elusiveness out into the open, making it explicit. His practice is a distinctive form of collage that seems at first to be unworthy of the name; images merely overlap each other, two or sometimes more, some cut at angles and others straight across. These simple gestures soon reveal themselves to be hugely resonant. The collision of different photographic states, with a kind of delicately orchestrated violence, is by now his trademark.
In these works the whole image acts as a surface or a screen and cannot be decomposed into its elements – there is instead a vocabulary of photographic codes, a set of assumptions about how the medium works that we use to negotiate the space of photographs, and these are in no way self-evident. All photography is a kind of abstraction – its codes are not about reality, but in fact are reality. Stezaker shows them to be fractured and deceptive, psychologically fraught – hierarchies of meaning that open into fault-lines. These breaks are literal of course, he physically cuts the image, but they are also figurative, to do with the fictive visual space of photographs, a continuity that acts as a real space. These illusions are maybe as much cultural as they are perceptual or material, but depend on a deep understanding of how the specific presence of the image shapes our reading of it. For Stezaker it is a kind of meta-study into the conditionality of meaning.
The raw material for his work draws on a vast amount of photographic ephemera from that precise moment up to and around the mid 20th century when strategies of mass communication had just begun to categorically redefine our social landscape. This is the golden age of picture magazines and movie starlets; new kinds of photographic reality begin reshaping the culture – we now definitively lived (and saw ourselves living) in the images that we made. Of course this is no coincidence. The questions that are most pressing for Stezaker deal with how a given image might fail the experience it depicts, rendering it ineffably strange, and the way in which that strangeness is not just a quality of the medium, but a fundamental disorder implicit in the social structures of late capitalism. He quietly interrogates the pervasive assumptions – psychological, political, economic – implied by photographic representation, that of the whole world seemingly reduced to little more than a (visual) commodity.
Stezaker’s response is not just theoretical, however. Instead, it is practical, destroying the coherence of images to open a filmic reach of unrealised desire, the endless blind stream of pictures falling into and out of our lives. He deals with photographs as agents of unexpected complexity; they become fields of engagement. The image is forcibly dematerialised; or rather our reading of the image is driven back to how the qualities of the material shape our understanding of the image as a bearer of content, an unstable system of references. Breaking that surface tension renders it, somewhat perversely, impenetrable, and so beyond whatever expectations we might have concerning a photographic reality, while at the same time being explicitly about that same question; meaning is not only rendered conditional, here it is actually set adrift.
These gestures that confuse the stable dimensions of photographic reality fall into a number of different categories, all related to the same basic vocabulary and each with its own particular effect on how the “new” image will be read. What they have in common that is that they seek to provoke some failure in the continuity of depicted space, which is both visual and psychological, an unravelling of the photographic code caused either by brining two opposing images together or by cutting into a photograph to expose the image he has placed beneath it, in a literal (but often dazzlingly effective) act of rupture.
What defines Stezaker’s use of collage as a practice is his determined reluctance to make (or even re-make) a cohesive visual space. Of course, collage has always been a tool for disturbing those expectations, but in Stezaker’s hands it is perhaps the conceptual disturbance that matters most, he neglects to (visually) unify these intersecting elements precisely because the total meaning of his work depends on the disjuncture between them. It is not only some facile notion of the “marvellous” then (as in the surrealist ideal) that drives these stylistic choices, rather it is a deeply understood relationship between the materiality of photographic images and their cultural significance, how it is the process itself that shapes meaning. Cutting into the photograph emphasises its surface, a perceptual fact (where the image adheres) and a metaphor.
This certainly relates to the use of films stills in the construction of Stezaker’s work, which have reoccurred frequently. In spite of an apparent (formal) disparity between successive projects this common source material is one of the things that draw all of them together. These images already form a surface or a cultural screen for a collective psycho-social dynamic and deconstructing that fictive space is really the core of his work. The projected (or rather performed) images of cinematic narrative become an interior projection, a dream-life for the society that created them. He systematically excavates anxieties and contradictions having to do with gender roles and political structures, forces that shape the landscape of contemporary life. It is because cinema is so obviously about how we would like to be seen – or see ourselves – that these images have provided such an important resource for Stezaker’s meditations on the complexities of perception, on the images we fashion and, with a kind of recursive density that in turn fashion how we live.
There are a number of specific themes that reoccur, all of which are realised in tandem with (or under the rubric of) Stezaker’s well established repertoire of collage techniques. It is this especially dynamic relationship between the process by which his work is realised and the conceptual heft of its effect that makes Stezaker such a significant artist. He forcefully suggests that what is real exists right at the edge of our capacity to make it visible, and must instead persist as a deep absence in every attempt to do so. In some cases this absence is a literal one, cut directly out of the photograph, collapsing space. The excisions form an alternate (and unexpected) narrative from the image, one at odds with how it might have been read before; once again it is a material intervention that reveals an otherwise unseen force in the currency of images to do with the exchange of meaning.
This near forensic study of the photographic medium is of consequence in so far as these images are an analogue for the assumptions we make about reality itself. Stezaker knows of course that we do not treat photographs as being interchangeable with their nominal subject, but that through a system of representational codes read the image as nothing more than what it is a picture of, as though the image was a screen and not explicitly a kind of material (or cultural) surface. It is through willfully complicating that expectation of a screen-like transparency that Stezaker’s work reveals itself as being very much about how those codes might fail, in turn showing the covert architecture that allows them to function, throwing our focus back to that ever-shifting distance between the world and whatever image we might have of it. His forced exchange between the photograph and the act of reference itself is at heart a philosophical question having to do with the "reality" of images, how photographs might exist more to validate appearance than to challenge it. In this way Stezaker’s interventions, his cutting into or across the image, aims to openly provoke a reality that is of an altogether different order than that of the photograph in itself, an unstable, often perverse reality that our expectations of the medium will not otherwise permit to be visible.
