Celebrity Files

Alex Delfanne

John Stezaker's studio with his collage desk, London, 2009

Alex Delfanne

John Stezaker's archive of publicity portraits and postcards, London, 2009

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"I’ve always been very suspicious of anything I generated: a mark, a style, a gesture," says John Stezaker. "I have to work with what’s there." It’s a classic conceptual premise, close to Douglas Huebler’s refusal to add any more objects to the world; but Stezaker, 59 — a respected figure since the late 1970s, but one whose profile has been on an exponential upswing since he began working with the London gallery The Approach in 2003 — arrives at decidedly nonconceptual results. His collages of antiquated imagery, sourced from memorabilia shops, secondhand bookshops, and eBay, posit photography as a dream space. Consider his "Fumetti" series (2008), which artfully conjoins segments of signed publicity photographs of forgotten male and female film stars to create newly alive hermaphroditic hybrids that are at once disturbing, hilarious, nostalgic, and surreal. "[Art historian] Griselda Pollock said that I was trying to marry my mother and father," Stezaker wryly recounts. Still, freedom of interpretation is built into these works, which are to my mind some of the only contemporary photography that slips the bonds of depicting reality to broach the hermeneutic spaciousness of painting.

A lifetime of roaming in theoretical discourse underpins Stezaker’s practice. The bookshelves of his study overflow with volumes by Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, and George Didi-Huberman, and he’s particularly influenced by the latter’s fascination with the idea of the fold: that, as the artist says, "you have to do violence to the image to restore it, to bring it to visibility." Again, though, the Englishman’s work can’t be reduced to illustrations of what’s already been rehearsed in language. The "Masks" series of 2007, in which he overlaid postcards onto larger publicity portraits, finds unlikely and showstopping continuations of contour — so that in Mask LXV, say, the shape of a woman’s waved hair is continued in an inset image of a tunnel: The face disappears, replaced by a view of gorges through which a railway line snakes away. The feel is Surrealist, of course (there’s an obvious analogue here in Dalí’s paranoiac landscapes from which faces arise). But what Stezaker demonstrates is something not quite visible: the enduring mystery, the irreducible compound mood that can arise from deft image conjunctions, the vast, hazy third thing that two straightforward — if loaded — things brought together can create. (Stezaker additionally, approvingly, points to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s related notion of "the Third Mind," and to Eisenstein’s montage — though not to the cheap, reductive way it’s been deployed in Hollywood, which snatches the viewer’s dreams and autonomic interpretations away.) Meaning, here, is vexed with an elegant simplicity that disguises a slow, patient prestidigitation. (No Photoshop for Stezaker, though it would make things a million times easier for him; he wants to be surprised himself, you sense.) "To turn an object upside down is to deprive it of its meaning," Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Phenomenology of Perception, and Stezaker’s long-running inverted landscapes prove it: Instantly, we’re suspended in the air, and seeing topography anew. At the time of writing, Stezaker seems to be shifting his emphases. Having discovered the advantages of buying multiple copies of books featuring luscious old duotone images of townscapes and landscapes, he’s considering exhibiting the books themselves. But otherwise — and given the multifarious nuances evidently achievable by his assiduous rapprochements between diversely lost people, places, and pasts — one suspects that Stezaker’s process will go on indefinitely. A newly found image will spur him, as he says it always does, and it’s back to the fastidiously organized files, the drawing board, and the deftly handled scissors.