Untitled 1978 - 1979

Curator: Here we have an intriguing piece by John Stezaker, simply titled "Untitled" and held in the Tate Collections. Editor: Wow, stark! The black swallows everything but that face. Feels like a half-remembered dream. Curator: Absolutely. The division created by the diptych format, bisecting the image, enhances the feeling of incompleteness and fragmentation. That narrow, bright line is powerful. Editor: Yes! It's like a sliver of reality trying to break through. And the profile itself… it’s so classic, almost a movie star. Yet, the darkness suggests something hidden, something… withheld. Curator: The use of found imagery, often from Hollywood publicity stills, is key to Stezaker's work. He's playing with our collective memory, the weight of the image, and how context shifts meaning. Editor: It makes you wonder what the original image was, what story it told. Now, it's a haunting fragment, ripe for interpretation. I like the mystery. Curator: Indeed, the lack of a definitive narrative is precisely the point. We're invited to fill in the blanks, to project our own associations onto this evocative fragment. Editor: Makes you think about how much we assume, how much we fill in just to make sense of things. Food for thought, definitely.