John Stezaker: Crossing Over

John Stezaker: Crossing Over gathers a decade of the British collagist's (b. 1949) work with vintage postcards &mdash sixty-five image fragments, incidental details lifted from the edges of found photographs, reprinted at full scale for the first time.

Made between 2005 and 2013 and building on Stezaker's long-running 3rd Person Archive, the fragments trace postcard production from the Victorian era into the postwar period, moving from black-and-white to colour. Stezaker isolates figures at a picture's margin &mdash a passerby, a conversation on a bench &mdash reading these incidental presences as records of time and memory rather than documentary content. Ridinghouse published the 114-page clothbound volume in 2014.

Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s and taught for decades at Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths College, and the Royal College of Art. He shaped a generation of collage and appropriation artists after him &mdash a pedagogical presence as consequential, in its way, as his own practice of cutting and crossing found pictures. He received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012, following his 2011 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective, and is represented by The Approach, London, and Petzel Gallery, New York. The library holds four other Stezaker titles: Nude and Landscape, Silkscreens, One on One, and the Rubell Family Collection volume.