Art and Design: John Stezaker

I've been manipulating photos and cutting into them recently for my project. I've been researching artists who work in a similar medium, and one I've found really interesting is John Stezaker.

John Stezaker is an artist who works mainly in photo collage. He cuts photos and mixes them with others, to make a new image, and sometimes to give the image a different meaning.

He matches a part of the face in the photo to the same part in the other, so it looks like it belongs to both. The rest of the face doesn't usually match with the other photo, for instance sometimes the eyes are looking in two different directions. A small change like this gives a slightly eccentric look to the image.

I like how something as simple as putting two mismatching halves of a photo together can completely change the tone of the image. Most of the photos he uses are portraits and don't have any particular feeling to them, but by putting two different photos together he makes funny or strange looking images, such as the Marriage photographs.

He mainly uses old film portraits to make these images. Sometimes he layers multiples of the same image over each other, cutting parts out of each such as the 'Love' photos.