This week, artist John Stezaker won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for his 2011 retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery...
This week, artist John Stezaker won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for his 2011 retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Working with found photographs and postcards, Stezaker has been creating eerily dismembered images for more than thirty years, yet only emerged from the post YBA morass in the mid-2000s, gaining wide acclaim when Charles Saatchi began collecting his work.
Prior to the opening of the Whitechapel show last year, Sean O’Hagan went to interview Stezaker at his home come studio for the S/S11 issue of AnOther Magazine. Here we present an extract from Sean’s account of the meeting, alongside a gallery of Stezaker’s prizewinning works.
“There is something very odd, even unnerving about cutting though a photograph. It sometimes feels like I am cutting though flesh. I try not to think too much about what I do or why, but persona is what I try to avoid. I favour actors that no one has ever heard of and I don’t even bother to look on the back of the photograph to find out what their names are. I want to encounter the face outside of what it represents, and I hope the viewer encounters it in a similar way.
"Persona is what I try to avoid. I want to encounter the face outside of what it represents, and I hope the viewer encounters it in a similar way."
Back [when I started], I was certainly using text and found images for some kind of politically disruptive purpose, but that has long since ceased to be the case. I must say that Debord’s diagnosis of living in a culture of images at a distance from the real is becoming ever more true. When you look around you at how popular culture operates, he seems more a visionary than ever.
My prime influences are literary – Pessoa, Kafka, Borges. I’m a total 60s boy in that way. I want to create a kind of fiction through the reader or, to be more precise, the spectator. I have been compared to the Surrealists but I reject that. I do feel I belong somehow to an older, stranger, Romantic tradition that includes the likes of Stanley Spencer and Joseph Cornell. It’s about some kind of enchanted relationship with the found. The work really comes out of being bored, though, out of what you might call states of distraction. On one level, I make art because I am just trying to overcome boredom every day."
An exhibition of the work of John Stezaker and the other photographers nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is at the Photographers Gallery until September 9.
Interview by Sean O'Hagan
