John Stezaker: Beware the Black and White

In John Stezaker’s 2006 collage piece, Untitled (Film Portrait), the artist has combined two 40s-era, black and white film stills along a diagonal axis, to unite two unrelated people as a single human form. The axis along which these images meet cuts at approximately an 80 degree angle from top to bottom, just right of the center of the frame, leaving the left side slightly larger. As in many of Stezaker’s pieces, the two bodies being joined are of opposite genders. The male, residing on the left side, appears to be seated, with one arm likely resting on his knee. He is dressed in a checked shirt, a light, solid-color vest, a rich, dark tie—which I assume must be red—with diagonal stripes, and a thick tweed blazer. The imagery behind the man is out of focus and therefore abstracted, but the play of bright light on the man’s shoulder and on the tips of his hair, as well as the absence of any furniture or recognizable architecture within the frame, suggest an outdoor setting. The right side of the frame presents a young woman with dark, wavy hair, leaning toward the camera, resting on her elbow, with one hand placed neatly on her forearm. She is dressed in a shimmering, sequined blouse or gown, and is wearing eye shadow, mascara, and dark lipstick—all of which suggest evening attire. The background is out of focus here as well, but the light and the presence of furniture imply an indoor setting, and the woman’s attire as well as the hard-edged shadows on her face further indicate that her scene is taking place at night.

At first glance, the face appears to be complete, without any interruption. The angle at which Stezaker combines the images lines up very closely with the angle at which the two figures’ heads are cocked. Stezaker carefully matches up key facial features, such as the top of the head, the curve of the chin, and with perfect precision, the edge of the top lip. With these particular joints so firmly in place, the other parts of the face, and certainly the bodies, that don’t line up so exactly are forgiven, or simply overlooked. The real kicker, of course, that gets the slip on our critical eye right from the start, is that these two figures’ eyes happen to be looking in exactly the same direction. With that, a single, complete form is instantly established in one, common 3-Dimensional space. The man on the left gracefully glances across the divide to the person on the woman’s left, calling her attention.

The work’s striking unity is not achieved simply through the precision of Stezaker’s alignments, or through the level of physical coherence he achieves in the combined space. The combination of the figures’ bodies in this piece makes almost no sense at all: the man’s right hand seems to teleport from the bottom left corner of the frame over to the right side, to rest delicately on the woman’s forearm, which itself extends across the axis, into the man’s chest cavity. But the line of her forearm is carried on in the folds of the man’s vest. Unity is established also in Stezaker’s attention to color and texture. There is an obvious correlation in the woven quality of the man’s tweed and the woman’s sequins; the light shade of the woman’s chair is picked up in the man’s shirt and the glare on his shoulder; the contrast of the smoothness of her bare arm against the grainy chair is repeated with the man’s smooth vest against his tweed.

These more abstract parallels provide some access to what I assume Stezaker intends to do with this work. He is upsetting our confidence in our discernments by pulling similarity out of the unexpected places. While often this act yields visual abstractions with beautiful formal complexity, one cannot deny that the artist intends to deal with the complexities of human character. By selecting stills from the 1940s, Stezaker is working with distinct, culturally familiar archetypes for each gender—sexual confusion was not a common topic in the popular media of this era. But the striking harmony of the split face, and particularly it’s furtive, knowing, rather comfortable expression, tears down the idealized separation and authorizes the exploration of a much stranger and deeper complexity to human nature. But the collapse Stezaker is enacting in this piece does not only address the historically unenlightened cultural standards of pre-1960s America, it functions as a reminder to exercise a certain amount of distrust when encountering all information presented in black and white, even, and perhaps especially, when encountering typically trustworthy visual information.