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I love John Stezaker’s Masks. In curating John Stezaker: Lost World, they were my starting point. He takes old black-and-white head shots and lays older scenic postcards over them, across the eyes, so they line up magically, in an uncanny merger of face and place. This simple idea plays out in nuanced ways.

Stezaker prefers showing the Masks as individuals, but I like seeing them en masse. It shows how repetitious, perhaps compulsive, they are. Stezaker is drawn to particular genres of scenic postcard. He returns to caves and rock arches, rivers and waterfalls, arched bridges and buildings. Is this his bent or are they simply the kinds of view that will interlock with faces? Is he imposing his will or coaxing out something latent in his sources?

Stezaker talks about fascination, about being in thrall to the image, as if he were not in control but akin to a medium—his sources speaking through him. But is that mere pretext? The question—agency or fascination?—hangs over his whole project.

The Masks also dance on a knife edge between life and death. Stezaker says masks are necessarily morbid, being dead, inanimate faces worn over vital, animate ones. But, the faces Stezaker masks are photos, already fixed. Paradoxically, by masking them with other dead images he breathes new life into them. Beautiful people of yesteryear, long gone, are resurrected and reanimated, their faces caught in metamorphosis. Petrifying, putrefying. Becoming, blooming.

John Stezaker: Lost World finishes its tour at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, 21 September—11 November 2018.
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