John Stezaker - Too much too little - David Campany Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2012

Deutsche Borse Prize awarded to John Stezaker in 2012 for his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Source: Campany, D (2012) John Stezaker: Too much too little. Available at: http://davidcampany.com/john-stezaker-deutsche/  last accessed 1/4/17

Photography and  appropriated photographic image makers share similarities and concerns of image making such as how to present part of the world or person in a different light.

Started in 1930's by documentary photographers, it took time for others to use the technique.

1st half of century -  Dada, cubism, surrealism, 2nd half of century - pop, situationalism, conceptualism, post modern. Now exploration of image archive and re-imagining the cinematic. Stezaker covers all the genres using books, postcards and film stills as his source material.

Collage means holding on, giving think time, acting on something, iconophilia (enjoying images) and (iconoclasm (destroying images). Time is suspended in Stezaker's images. He uses voids (empty spaces) repetition, doubles, mirroring an recurrent motifs to bring order and logic to images.

Goal of a photography exhibition is suspension of time in which viewers get lost in the images.

Stezaker - The third person archive is a series of images from the same book (Countries of the World, John Hammerton 1920). Stezaker uses miniature people images printed onto one page. The people are so small they become ephemeral, sometimes made up of pixels, unrecognisable in all but shape. When a person meets another person they face accountability and "relations of self and other." (Campany, 2012) These people share our visual culture and space. "If we sense an image is photographic and we sense that it contains a person then we are in the presence of a trace of another subjectivity, another consciousness. (Campany, 2012) It doesn't matter that we can't recognise the person in the image. Images can be "treacherous...elusive, laconic." (brief or concise) (Campany 2012) Rene Magritte called it the Treason of Images. World is tied up with genre and language (name, date, commentary). It is the commentary that has no rules. We are bombarded by images and Stezakers work makes us reflect on the problems of mass media.

References
Campany, D (2012) John Stezaker: Too much too little. Available at: http://davidcampany.com/john-stezaker-deutsche/  last accessed 1/4/17

Additional reading around John Stezaker
John Stezaker - role reversal in some images by rearranging the order of the photograph.

Stezaker fascinated by the "obsolescence of images, the point at which they become illegible, mysterious, at which they touch another world." (Butler, 2012)

Situationists relied on language in images. Stezaker abandoned text in favour of cultural and psychic associations of the image itself.

Stezaker comes across images like a flaneur - except that he lets the images find him. Mixture of situationalist and surreal (beauty is found by chance) methods led him to look at juxtaposing images in an unexpected way to give new meaning and experience. "Exploration of how images are codeified by social and commercial systems." (Butler, 2012) By changing the images the manipulated image becomes noticeable. When a film still or advertisement is placed outside of its natural surroundings, the image takes on a different quality - one of heightened tension or a directed narrative which he sees as a "spectral and shadowy underworld." (Stezaker as cited by Butler, 2012)

Stezaker's work has a liminal space - the viewer becomes the third person - party to an event and objectified or distanced from it. (Liminal - transition - time between what was and what is next, waiting, not knowing.

Third person work - original figures from book were small like film extras. Stezaker makes them central but because they are grainy or pixelated they are mysterious. The viewer participates but doesn't know why they are there.

Shadow - Karl Yung shadow is an example of the unconscious - stand in for the viewer, artist, underworld, invitation to enter the dream world.

Appropriation - "one of the strategies used by artists to question the ideologies behind the apparent neutrality of the photographic image and its ubiquitous dispersal in consumer culture." (Butler, 2012)

References
Butler, K. (2012) Kemper Art Museum: John Stezaker. Available at: http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/files/StezakerGuide.pdf last accessed 2/4/17