John Stezaker: Marriage

Marriage, this latest monograph in John Stezaker's brilliant Film Portraits, finds the British artists once again playing the edge between caricature and portraits, the real and the incredible. Stezaker's medium is vintage film stills, and his delicate, almost Cubist, portrait-collages, which play with scale, representation and - most powerfully - the viewers' expectations, seem both vulnerable and even more deeply human than the 'real thing.' Writes Cecilia Jardemar in an excellent introduction, 'Stezaker was making visible that which is hidden but we know to exist, liberating us from the two-dimensionality of ordinary flat photographic representation...and proposes instead an image which reflects our endlessly transitional reality.'