John Stezaker: Lost World
John Stezaker: Lost World catalogs a touring survey of the British collagist's (b. 1949) work, built on his account of collage as 'a yearning for a lost world' &mdash images from an archive of out-of-date film stills, actor headshots, and postcards that have lost their immediate relationship to the world they depicted.
Alongside the collages, the book documents Stezaker's found-object sculptures &mdash antique mannequin hands arranged as a repertoire of gestures &mdash and Crowd, a film work presenting hundreds of film-still crowd scenes for a single frame each. Ridinghouse published the 88-page softcover catalog in 2017 with essays by Geoffrey Batchen, David Campany, and curator Robert Leonard, for the exhibition Leonard organized at City Gallery Wellington (26 August &ndash 19 November 2017), which toured to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth Christchurch Art Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, through late 2018.
The tour across four New Zealand and Australian venues reflects how far Stezaker's reputation now extends beyond Britain: his work sits in the collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 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 &mdash the library's fifth Stezaker title.
