Fat Nancy’s been looking at things to do with photographs from markets and car boot sales, grandma’s attic and old photo studios … here’s two artists working with found portraits that FN’s been looking at again today.

Playful and an absolute Fat Nancy favourite is John Stezaker. There’s a nice short interview from the Guardian here:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/aug/08/john-stezaker-best-photograph

I call my combinations of images of men and women “marriages”. It is an old idea for me, although this is a recent work, from my series Muse. Each picture consists of a man smoking combined with a female other half, the idea being that he is “inhaling inspiration”, which is classically associated with the female. When I started producing marriages, I felt I was creating new beings. They were more like people than the original bland glamour shots of the 40s and 50s that I used as source material. Somehow, when they got broken up and recombined, real people seemed to emerge. John Stezaker

And then Julie Cockburn, who’s mode of attack seems to be a kind of defacement,  at once destroying the portrait whilst embellishing them with almost sculptural drawings, stitching and splicing.

We put up a few favourite images from both these artists here …