Analysis: John Stezaker

John Stezaker (born 1949) living in Worcester, is an english conceptual artist who focuses on experimenting with photographic collage techniques. Stezaker uses found photographs such as vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed images. Stezaker is a very independent artist and his work has been shown in many solo exhibitions around the world and is part of many art museum collections.  

I feel that the main concept behind Stezakers work is how he focuses on relationships and creating conversations by combining two very different photographs. Stezaker uses found photographs of mainly landscape and portraiture. Stezaker uses mainly old photography in his collages but I really love how he uses grayscale photography for the background photograph and colour in the foreground. Using colour in the foreground, especially for nature, adds this excitement and much more vibrance to these old grayscale photographs. I really like these images below because of how he has focused on relationships and used portraiture of couples behind kissing/ flirting/ talking etc and covering with landscape nature images. Stezakers collage is very simple with only 2 layers always being used in his work, however Stezaker is very smart and unique in how he connects the two images by using line and shape to merge areas of the face and continuing them on with the hills and trees in the landscape photography. Stezaker focuses a lot on relationships and the use of nature in the collages could be his way to show how love is natural.

I feel that another concept behind Stezakers work is the documentation of truth and memory because of how he uses these old found images and adds his own modern meaning when combining images. I really like these portraiture collages below from Stezakers 2006 'Marriage' series. Stezaker used old hollywood images of male and female film stars and connected them by cutting and overlapping the photographs to perfectly join facial features and create these stylistic surreal collages. I really love how Stezaker has this style to almost perfectly join images of peoples faces and also shows this rough style when presenting his work by not perfectly cutting and framing the images.