John Stezaker
John Stezaker is the largest monographic survey yet published on the British collagist (b. 1949), the catalog for his 2011 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective &mdash the exhibition that established Stezaker, after four decades of work, as a defining figure in photographic appropriation.
The 220-page volume gathers found images, collages, and image fragments made from the 1970s onward, including a selection from The 3rd Person Archive, Stezaker's ongoing collection of incidental figures clipped from illustrated books, in over 120 illustrations. Essays by Dawn Ades and Michael Bracewell place the work in art-historical context, alongside a conversation between Stezaker and curators Daniel F. Herrmann and Christophe Gallois. Ridinghouse published the softcover volume with Whitechapel Gallery, Mudam Luxembourg, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, which hosted the exhibition on its tour.
The Whitechapel retrospective this catalog accompanies proved a turning point in Stezaker's reception: it led directly to his winning the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012, a notable choice for an artist who has never taken a photograph. He is represented by The Approach, London, and Petzel Gallery, New York. This is the definitive survey among the library's Stezaker holdings, alongside Nude and Landscape, Silkscreens, One on One, the Rubell Family Collection volume, and the batch added with it: Crossing Over, Double Shadow, Film Still, and Lost World.
