Collection: John Stezaker

John Stezaker (born 1949) is a British artist whose work uses found photographic images — film stills, portrait photographs, postcards and press images — cut, collaged and juxtaposed to produce new and often unsettling meanings. Working almost exclusively with existing imagery rather than producing his own photographs, Stezaker treats the found image as a readymade whose latent content can be released through simple acts of cutting and combination. His Marriage series pairs male and female film star portraits so that their faces overlap and merge; his Mask series interrupts portrait photographs with landscape postcards placed over the face. The results are formally precise and psychologically charged, operating at the intersection of surrealism, appropriation and a sustained inquiry into how photographic images construct identity, desire and recognition. Stezaker’s work was made largely outside the mainstream art world for several decades before receiving significant institutional recognition from the 2000s onwards.