Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXVIII

John Stezaker’s practice re-examines the photographic image’s role as a document, souvenir and symbol of modernity. For his ‘Marriage’ series, Stezaker spliced together publicity shots of classic film stars; like the Exquisite Corpses of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, these photo-collages become uncanny, chimeric figures. In Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXVIII, Stezaker joined together a man and a woman at the mouth, and the work’s title alludes to this fusion. As the artist explains, ‘My work has been about an abandonment to the fragment … I think I started a long time with an idea—that there are too many images in the world and I needed to find a way to negotiate the space between images, but I couldn’t give myself any kind of agenda as broad as that anymore.’ Stezaker’s collages have been exhibited at the Netherlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, the Centre de la Photographie Genève, Geneva, and the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, among others.