John Stezaker: At the Edge of Pictures

At the Edge of Pictures is the first monographic study of the British collagist John Stezaker (b. 1949). The Oxford scholar Yuval Etgar takes the eventful decades of the 1970s and 1980s as the prism for a historical account of the artist's life and work, and a mapping of collage and image appropriation in that pivotal period.

Amid the post-conceptual crisis of the 1970s, Etgar argues, Stezaker pursued neither the agitprop-inspired photomontage of his British contemporaries nor full alignment with the Pictures Generation across the Atlantic, instead treating mechanically reproduced imagery (studio portraits, film stills, landscape postcards) as an outmoded visual currency to be recombined with minimal, exacting cuts. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König published the 176-page Otabind softcover in 2020 with Luxembourg + Co., on the occasion of the first exhibition devoted to Stezaker's early output of 1975–1990, gathering rarely seen collages, readymades and silkscreens in 82 color and 15 black-and-white illustrations.

Stezaker came to prominence among the British conceptualists of the 1970s and received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012, following his 2011 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective. He is represented by The Approach, London, and Petzel Gallery, New York. As the first historical study of the practice, this volume complements the library's Stezaker survey catalogs, among them the 2010 Whitechapel monograph and Film Still.