Photographs, generally thought of as telling “the truth” – the camera cannot lie – can be deceptive. Images taken of film stars are carefully posed to bring out the best of their subject. Likewise, postcards of landscape are equally contrived in depicting the most appealing view, but may not represent a true picture of the landscape. Ever since the invention of photography there is a long history of photographers manipulating images, such as adding dramatic skies to liven up the scene. In Soviet Russia, politicians fallen out of favour were carefully removed from official photographs, their presence an embarrassment to the establishment. In pre-war Germany, the artist John Heartfield produced agit-prop collaged images that mercilessly satirised Hitler and the Nazi regime until he had to flee the county.
John Stezaker follows in this tradition of collaging, but makes it uniquely his own. Fascinated by the ambiguous power of photographs, he manipulates them to create often disturbing, subversive images. By inverting, adjusting and slicing the photographs he subtly distorts and confuses the eye. Taking such things as classic movie stills of film stars, vintage postcards and book illustrations, usually from ‘found’ pictures, he reassembles them to give them new meaning.
Including more than 90 works from the 1970s to today, the wide range of this comprehensive retrospective explores the way ‘real’ images can be given new interpretations. In the Mask series, he fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with postcards of caves, hamlets or waterfalls to produce eerie, surreal works of art. His Dark Star series converts publicity portraits into cut-out images sand ilhouettes to create an ambiguity in place of the absent celebrity.
One of the subtleties series uses images of unidentified “stars” that, at first glance, seem perfectly ordinary but on a closer look they have been cut across the eyes, either making them more prominent by enlarging them or reducing them in size. With minimal intervention Stezaker adjusts the portrait in a deeply disturbing way. In Love XI, he enlarges the eyes to give them a startled look that is in contrast to the smiling face. Slicing through the eyes is particularly disturbing in touching on sight and blindness, a theme chillingly explored by surrealist Salvatore Dali who made a short film with Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou in 1929) in which a close-up of an eye appears to be cut through. Dali’s unnerving surgery can hardly be viewed without squirming. In comparison, Stezaker’s images are understated but still disturbing.
There are many “readings” to Stezaker’s work. Some, with a dramatic postcard covering the top half of the face, suggest a psychological dimension – is this what we dream about, a dream world of idyllic landscape? Some are amalgams of two faces, one male, one female, which neatly fit together to seem like a coherent whole, an alignment so skilful that they allow us to hold several opposing perceptions simultaneously. Again, there is a psychological aspect that suggest androgyny or gender confusion.
John Stezaker’s thoughtful images demand a careful look to reveal the subtlety of the work, the more you ponder the more is revealed. By combining aspects of conceptual work with familiar, “real” images he highlights the way photographs can be open to an endless series of interpretations.
John Stezaker continues until March 18
