Photographer John Stezaker is the winner of this year's Deutsche Borse prize

攝影師 John Stezaker 成為本年度 Deutsche Borse 獎金獲得者

John Stezaker，中央聖馬丁校友，這位63歲的老藝術家，新銳不減，大膽的處理和表現手法，使其攝影作品在表達觸及人性、美學思考、人文及社會關懷等層面的命題時，稜角分明，意境幽遠。

“I assumed all photographers hated me for cutting up their images” John Stezaker told me, earlier this year “stealing them and then cutting them, even worse.”

Nevertheless, the 63 year old artist has today won this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, for his 2011 retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery. Recognition has been a long time coming - he has been making his photo-collages since the 1970s, sustaining all the while a highly influential teaching career at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. The exhibition was his first major show, and while a brilliant coup, also highly deserved.

His ingredients are simple: studio portraits from cinema’s golden age; Baroque pastoral landscapes, Victorian gothic engravings and humdrum postcards. In scoring and slicing, rotating and recombining them, he mixes moods, tempers, histories and locations, slyly manoeuvring the images until they step outside their former roles and slip into something more creepy, more witty, more vital. Strange energies pulse through these hybrids.

“It’s how you might imagine reincarnation” he says, “or the way you can never quite remember your dreams. Moving an image from one world into another is like taking it into a dream world where it has forgotten its original function but it will always have that trace of its former life. I am attracted to that trace.”

Fifty years of collecting has left him with images of every imaginable variety: cats, dogs, copies of Good Housekeeping, actors with ladders. “There are a lot of ladders on film sets - they became props for the photographers.” His most recent fetish is billboards  all six sheets of them.

（英文信息來自倫敦藝術大學）