John Stezaker

And I found, John Stezaker, one of the first English conceptual artists, who reacted against the idea of pop art. Stezaker preceded avant-garde, Dada, cubism and surrealism as a response to the world of 'photo mechanically produced mass culture'.


His work is surrealistic, combining crop and collage together. Stezakers' source of materials is mainly postcards, film stills, images from photographically illustrated books. His technique is to find, select, crop and put together.













I found some of his work extremely interesting and brave in a sense. brave crop, powerful images and messages. 



Looking at his work I found that there is still loads to explore, but what I am concentrating on is the crop of my families images. I wouldn't dare to combine my grandads' face to somebody else, it would be like deletion of ones identity, and combination of two people, and possibly personalities. I found Stezakers' choice of cropping even harsher than mine. However, I'm sure I could do the same of something even more extreme when working with strangers' images. It would be so much easier. Therefore I work with the images of people who are too important to me to put them together with somebody else.

I thought that perhaps I could collage together my grandad and my grandma, together as one person, as they are in a sense, after over 50 years of life together. That would kind of represent the 'grandparents' as one. Although, what I intend to do with my project at the moment, is to separate one image into several pieces, creating individual images of each body part and highlighting its importance together with the text that I worked on a while, and I believe I'm about at the point where I wanted myself to be.