Fragments: John Stezaker

Tue 03 Oct 1978 - Sat 11 Nov 1978

Cover image of 'Fragments: John Stezaker' catalogue, 1978

Fragments: John Stezaker

Tue 03 Oct 1978 - Sat 11 Nov 1978

This event is part of our Past Programme

Extract taken from the introduction to 1978 exhibition catalogue:

`Fragments' refers both to the character of photographs and, literally to the
pictures exhibited, severed in this act from their usual currency (from their
existence in mechanically reproducible form). The collages and montages
exhibited represent 'encounters' with fragments and with the imaginary spaces opened up by pictures. Collage offers the possibility of challenging the hold which pictures exert upon our imagination, perceptions, even our situation (vantage point) in the world.

In focusing on genres of photography which are most explicitly tied to the market and whose usual situation of encounter is characterised by the passing interest attendant to a cash exchange, there is the possibility of penetrating the mysterious realms of popular imagination and of confronting the familiar inhabitants of these realms which we call stereotypes and whose chief pictorial currency in this age is photography (film or still). Here in the unconscious exchanges involved in the passing interest of recognition, we can sometimes glimpse photography giving space to the imagination, giving shape and form to objects of desire, dread, attraction and repulsion. The exhibition consists of such encounters enacted (actively) in the collage process. These are incisions, like the act of exhibition itself — a severing of fragments from the realm in which they cohere in our unconsciousness.

'Fragments' consists of attempts to grasp the ephemeral moments of unconscious 'consumption' tangibly in the collages and montages and consciously in the notes made in their production. These attempt equivalently to describe the subjective response to pictures shielded from awareness in the momentariness of `passing interest.