Photography and Cinema

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recombined into broken narratives in a style that mixed Dada, Surreal-

ism and Situationist graphics. Turning to film stills in the late 1970 s,

Stezaker refined a near-minimalist approach to collage. Joining just two

images either with precise cuts or by simply laying one fragment upon

another, he aimed to extract the maximum effect from the least promis-

ing source material. His subversions of film portraits in particular seem

to unmask the repressed psychological charge that drives characters in

even the most generic narrative films.

Other artists have examined thegapsthat exist in cinema’s archives.

Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye noticed how little documentation there is

of many African-Americans who worked in film.The Fae Richards Photo

Archiveis a fabricated but entirely plausible album of the life of a black

actress and singer (Fae Richards, 1908 – 1973 ). She starts her career with

bit-parts, playing housekeepers and maids. She comes into her own in

the bohemian jazz age, becomes a famous star, gets involved in the civil

rights movement, but spends her last years forgotten. The archive has

been published as a book and exhibited as a set of museum ‘artefacts’.

They were also used in Dunye’s filmThe Watermelon Woman( 1996 ),

a story of a young black gay filmmaker who goes in search of evidence

of the forgotten Fae.^12129

opposite: 110 John Baldessari,Junction
Series: Landscape, Seascape,Woman
(with Hat) andWoman PaintingToe Nails
(2002). Digital photo print with acrylic on
sintra panel. 8 parts, 214 x 206 cm.


111 John Stezaker,Cross-Connections
(1976).

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