John Stezaker Love

The Look of Love

Collage, Cutting and Photoroman in the Art of John Stezaker

Michael Bracewell

16

Her expression set and wary, a young woman fixes a man with a look that is piercing, that infers some manner of probation, perhaps accusation, yet remains erotically ambiguous, almost sly. All we can see of the young man is the back of his head, his dark hair, the roll neck of his pullover. We see this young couple as though we are standing just behind the man’s right shoulder, watching their confrontation. The setting is claustrophobically domestic: the hang of the patterned curtains, the edge of a picture frame.

Loosely centred on a portrait-format off-white background, the blackand-white photographic image depicting this encounter is divided into four square panels, separated by a thin white line along their connecting edges. Three comprise the left-hand ‘corner’ of the total image; but the fourth, furthest to the viewer’s right, is positioned partially beneath the panel it abuts, lowered and tilted downwards – as though it had ‘slipped’ –to make a vertical break or cut down the centre of the young woman’s face.

This ‘slippage’ and semi-occlusion of the fourth panel, fracturing the woman’s countenance, produces an immediately arresting disjunction within the image as a whole, breaking the confines, however informal, of the picture plane created by the colourless background. The effect of the intervention draws the viewer into a perceptual engagement with the image that is as disquieting as it is compelling and vertiginous. Both the woman’s expression and our experience of looking have been rearranged in a manner resembling oscillation.

As we look at the image ‘halted’ by the disjunction, our perception loses its bearings: the woman seems to have two expressions at the same time, one half-smiling, the other surly and withdrawn. The ‘slipped’ or ‘dropped’ image breaks the originating sense of her expression vertically, down the centre of her mouth, thus creating a flicker and tension between two apparent meanings, with the side effect of heightening both. The viewer’s cognition of the image is thus forced to double-track: the gaze shuttles between each half of the image reflexively, seeking a central point on which to rest, but finding none. As The Who once sang, ‘The simple things you see are all complicated.’

17

18

Untitled (Photoroman), 1977–78. Collage, 8.6 × 11 cm | 3⅜ × 4¼ in.

This small collage, Untitled (Photoroman) (1977–78), made by John Stezaker, has the faintly Cubist air of depicting its subject from multiple viewpoints; yet this perceptual experience of the work seems less responsive to aesthetics or formalist qualities than to semiotics and psychology. ‘Photoroman’ – the print media form from which the collaged image has been sourced – refers to the genre of mass-market romantic novels, published in weekly magazine format, that originated in France and Italy during the 1940s. ‘Photoroman’ stories were romantic novellas told in photographs with minimal written dialogue, each photographed ‘scene’ looking not dissimilar to a still from a low-budget film or television soap opera.

The arrest, fracture and realignment of such an image, created by an apparently simple intervention and enabled by a single act of collage, transforms the stock scene depicted in Untitled (Photoroman) into an oddly haunted psychological moment. There is a coldness and brutalism to the work – the impersonality and hollowed-out aura of mass-produced imagery – as well as intimacy and mystery.

One could say that such ‘re-seeing’ of an individual, as enabled by Stezaker’s art, replicates in this case the emotional processes or stages of romantic love and desire, infatuation or disillusion, as these states grow or wane: how a person can be revealed to another as though in a different light, suddenly re-seen, prompting altered responses to their presence and being.

The works by John Stezaker brought together in the exhibition John Stezaker: Love (held at The Approach, London, in 2018) were made by the artist between 1976 and 2017. They share and exemplify Stezaker’s iconic interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-twentieth century and as such products of modernist culture: the image flow of electrical-mechanical mass and popular culture, notably film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His source material possesses the glamour of both its times and the functions for which it was produced. Heightened romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery, whether in the idealisation of scenery on a picture postcard, or created by the highly skilled lighting, posing and preparation of a star for a publicity shot, or the minute and all-encompassing technical precision required to shoot a scene of a feature film.

Stezaker selects images that are the products of industrially created romantic fantasies, as those industries existed during the core decades of the twentieth century. Their purpose was to enchant the viewer-consumer, proposing a beautified, more transcendent or exciting reality, free of

19