Feature: The Big Picture - Exhibition - John Stezaker Photography at Whitechapel Gallery from January 29 to March 18

Published: 27 January, 2011

BRITISH photographer and artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images and the power involved in the act of looking. 

Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, he makes collages to give old images a new meaning. 

By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. 

A major new exhibition, which  opens at the Whitechapel Gallery on Saturday, includes more than 90 works from the 1970s to today. 

Stezaker’s “Mask” series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, to create images of eerie beauty. 

His “Dark Star” series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. 

Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his “Third Person Archive”: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they take the centre stage in the viewer’s attention.

Stezaker, who lives and works in London, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s and has taught at  St Martin’s School of Art, Goldsmith’s College and the Royal College of Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Ridinghouse in association with the Whitechapel Gallery (£24.95). 

• John Stezaker is in Gallery 1 at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1, from January 29-March 18, Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, Thursday 11am-9pm. Admission free, 020 7522 7888, www.whitechapelgallery.org