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04.06.14

John Foster | Accidental Mysteries

Found, Cut, and Rearranged: The Art of John Stezaker

For almost four decades, the artist John Stezaker (British, b. 1949) has steadfastly been appropriating “found” press photographs, film stills, imagery from books, old postcards, and the like, to create a strikingly new way of seeing photography. One can tell that the artist is profoundly infatuated with images, whether he is subtracting from them (by cutting parts of them out) or adding them to another source. A winner of the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012, Stezaker has built his highly original collages upon reference points of others before him — from the Surrealists to Modernists like Warhol, to contemporary Postmodern Appropriation artists such as Goldstein, Prince, Longo, Kruger, and Levine. With an open nod to these connected threads, Stezaker’s work has managed to find a comfortable new niche in the art world, a place where forty years of hard and unwavering work has taken him. (For more on Stezaker's work, see this thoughtful analysis by Rick Poynor published here in 2012.)