John Stezaker
Stezaker in his marriage series, focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid 'icons' that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny.
I look at his work as the earlier forms of photo-manipulations, one reason why I relate to it.
Stezaker's style is very simple when you first look at it, though when you look deeper on how he matched the male and female features are stunning. It is also creepy on how alike certain opposite gender actors and actresses actually look alike.
He does mainly work with portraits, but not just their faces, he also utilizes their gestures of hand placement for insistence. The one image that sticks out to me, is the one half black and white and sephia toned. Normally when I am creating my photo-manipulations, I like to make them all one color. This way it physically looks like an actual image because the color tones and high lights are the same. Though in this one image makes you wonder, not only are the combining images different colors but the features are not seemingly lined up with one another like most of his other work as I looked on.
From the hair line the match up is spot on, then you move down and see some slight features of the female more. I think the point he was trying to show in this particular collage was to focus on "like" features of a face.
Another image that relates to this concept but adds another element to his work is another black and white photo, with what looks to be a couple but their faces are not shown. Instead he placed another sephia toned image over their faces of a bridge in between two rock mountains. If you look deeper as I noted before the mountains that sit on either side in the middle image outline a blocked out version of the couples profile view of their face, well where their face should be.
His work does not consist of a lot of images and I enjoy that. His work to me feels like graphic design.
The image of Lucy black and white and the uses of geometric triangle zipper feature in the middle of her face with a pop of color is amazing. It is very simple but very effective, that we all have someone else in side of us.
There is one image where he combines three elements however, and that is one that provides some text. The bottom image looks like there was already some writing on it and he cut instead of folded the females photo that also had some writing on and lines the text up with the facial features that makes you do a double take. Grant the female image does not have "clean" edges in a sense to me it likes like a mask which is very cool.
A lot of Stezakers work I relate to with my own, I am always working with images where features match and line up. When creating images such as this, you have to make sure the images themselves originally are facing in the same direction and you also need to have a good eye.
What I also like about his work is how he uses other elements other then just faces. When he uses outside scenery images to help tell the story, takes talent. To be able to match up features made by nature to the human structure is amazing.
As said before his work at points being different colors in certain images does not bother me, because it helps tell the story behind the images.
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