Research on the Work of John Stezaker

Today I saw the exhibition in Saatchi Gallery – Out of Focus: Photography and I’m really interested the work of British artist John Stezaker.

He is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking 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.

Stezaker’s recent key theoretical research interests are in the found image, collage, and collecting. Additionally, he has recently been exploring more particular issues relating to the aesthetics of symmetry and the history of aerial imagery.

To some extent, the concept of his is similar with my recent photography project, but by different way to give the original photographs new meanings.  Unlike Stezaker, his work is combined two pictures to create a new picture, my work is combined two different mediums – picture and oil painting, opening up new characters, relationships and meanings.  What’s more, I think, probably his work more relates to the old time but mine is concentrated to different uncertain possibilities of the future.   But the same thing of us is that we try to intrude the photograph to produce new meaning by different ways.  Just as he mentioned, ‘You can only get a feeling of the inviolable purity and sanctity of the emulsion of a photograph by violating it.’