John Stezaker: Unassisted Readymade

Its title borrowed from Duchamp, Unassisted Readymade is a large-format monograph that frames the British artist John Stezaker's collage practice as the act of choosing an image rather than making one: the found photograph as readymade.

Across 144 oversize pages, publicity stills of golden-era Hollywood icons are spliced, inverted, and overlapped into uncanny hybrid stars, alongside works that examine the photograph's competing roles as document of truth, purveyor of memory, and emblem of modern culture. Edited by Jürg Trösch and Markus Bosshard and co-published by JRPRingier and Codax Publisher, Zurich, the volume carries an essay by the writer and curator David Campany, who reads Stezaker's method as returning seemingly banal imagery to its essential freedom.

Stezaker (b. 1949) has worked with found images from books, magazines, and postcards since the early 1970s, well represented in this collection by titles including Fumetti, Tabula Rasa, Film Still, and Lost World he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012 for a practice built entirely on photographs he never took.