John Stezaker: Double Shadow

John Stezaker: Double Shadow presents the British collagist's (b. 1949) recent series of paired, doubled silhouettes &mdash an uncanny turn in a five-decade practice built from found photographs.

Cutting figures from 1950s Hollywood publicity portraits and laying the remaining silhouettes as dark shapes against black grounds, Stezaker splits and superimposes two profiles into single hybrid forms &mdash doppelgängers, hermaphrodites, faces that blur masculine and feminine. The seventy-one collages mark what Stezaker has called a rediscovery of 'the pleasures of drawing,' worked entirely in cut paper. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König published the 128-page softcover volume with Ridinghouse, following Stezaker's exhibition at The Approach, London (24 February &ndash 26 March 2022), with an essay by Margaret Iversen, 'John Stezaker: Doubles and Shadows.'

The doubling technique extends a method Stezaker has worked for decades: the single, precise cut that joins two found images into one, and the related 3rd Person Archive (1976&ndashpresent), his ongoing collection of incidental figures clipped from illustrated books. Stezaker came to prominence among the British conceptualists of the 1970s and received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012. He is represented by The Approach, London, and Petzel Gallery, New York &mdash the fifth Stezaker title in the library's collection.