John Stezaker: Film Still
John Stezaker: Film Still is the first comprehensive survey of the body of work the British collagist (b. 1949) is best known for &mdash collages built from vintage publicity stills clipped from classic-era Hollywood and B-pictures.
Stezaker began cutting into film stills in 1979, a shift away from the text-based conceptualism of his earlier work, and the series has run continuously since. The 144-page volume traces its evolution: an early reliance on Hitchcock's American-period stills gives way to the anonymous mass of low-budget 1940s and early 1950s studio product, as Stezaker's excisions and superimpositions turn found publicity photography into images of estrangement and doubling. Ridinghouse published the softcover survey in 2011 with a critical essay by David Campany and a recorded conversation between Campany and the artist.
The library's other Stezaker catalog, Nude and Landscape, reads the artist against art-historical tradition specifically to move away from 'the cinematic imagery his found-image work is best known for' &mdash this volume returns directly to that imagery, the source material Stezaker has mined longest. He 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.
