English artist John Stezaker is known for his witty, surrealist collages, made from found images. He also makes flicker films, presenting collections of found images of similar subjects one per frame, twenty-four frames per second. The individual images don’t linger long enough on the screen for us to distinguish them. They become scrambled, collaged in time. Stezaker’s films turn on photographic cliches, the tendency to photograph similar subjects with similar compositions. For Kiss (2019–20), he compiles old film stills of couples kissing or preparing to, reanimating their chaste stasis into a jittery eroticism. In Train (2012–21), similarly composed photographs of steam trains regain their throbbing, piston-driven vitality, as they pump out smoke. Kisses and trains have long been cinema archetypes. Stezaker’s films nod to the early days of cinema, to Thomas Edison’s risqué The Kiss (1896) and the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895).
John Stezaker studied at the Slade School in London in the 1960s, and went on to teach at Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, and the Royal College. In 2012, he was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has had major solo shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2011; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, 2012; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2013; City Gallery Wellington, 2017; and National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019. He’s been in the 1982 Venice Biennale; 2006 Tate Triennial, London; and 2014 Sydney Biennale. He is based in London and St Leonards.
Image: John Stezaker ‘Train’ 2012–21.
