Warstat, A., 2019.

Forgetful photography: John Stezaker and the politics of escape

Is there, today, a political valence in forgetting and forgetfulness? How might this relate to a mnemonic technology such as photography?

The Mask photo-collages of John Stezaker are constructed from archival images where the people represented in the pictures are unidentifiable: we have forgotten who these 1950s publicity shots are of. These actors are consigned to a second form of forgetting as a result of Stezaker's manipulation of the images: the faces are edited - cut through - in a process of creative disfigurement. What does this photographic process indicate about the potential for a practice of photography based on disappearance, and is there any political agency to be found in such a practice?

Stezaker's work cannot be defined as a 'practice of negation' (a key tendency within radical modernism, according to art historians such as T.J. Clark); instead his images focus on something in the photograph that is unseeable, but still present. The subjects in Stezaker's portraits have a presence - we see someone - but they are not visually 'whole' individuals. What we perceive is the disappearance of a person through the surface of a mutilated photograph. We can never definitively know the person portrayed based on the fragmented faces we see, and yet something like a person is still there. What do these ambivalent portraits tell us about the power of forgetting and non-appearance?

Galloway and Thacker suggest that "future avant-garde practices will be those of nonexistence"(1), going on to argue that, when existence has becomes a measurable science of control, nonexistence and escape become tactics to avoid that control. The implication is that forgetting - as the escape from a reductive will-to-presence and recollection - is not merely a failure to remember, but a paradoxically potent form of resistance. Can the creative process of a 'forgetful photography' (that we might see in Stezaker's work) be understood as the refusal to participate in an intolerable present? Could the refusal to be remembered answer to Agamben's suggestion that "a being radically devoid of any representable identity [...] would be absolutely irrelevant to the State"(2)?


1. Galloway, A. R. and E. Thacker (2007). The Exploit : A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis, Minn. ; London, University of Minnesota Press.
2. Agamben, G. (1993). The Coming Community. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.