Benstezakerart

05/11/2025

I would be delighted if you could attend the opening of my solo exhibition ‘Looking At Seeing Through’ on the 15th of November 2025. The opening will be from 6-8pm and the address is: 78 Norman Rd, Saint Leonards-on-sea TN38 0EJ. 

Alongside the show I will be launching my new monograph ‘Opacities’ which is a more extensive representation of the work on show, published by .
 
The show is then open from 11am-5pm Wednesday to Saturday until the 13th December. 
 
I look forward to seeing you there.
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‘Looking At Seeing Through’ is a show of three series of cameraless photographic works by Ben Stezaker.

‘In our contemporary culture of media transparency it is sometimes difficult to remember that we are looking at images. We are habituated to seeing through them as if transparent windows. Only when that transparency is disrupted are we aware of the image itself.

The ‘Opacities’ are photograms of what is often called obscured glass, the kind of glass one finds in private parts of domestic homes. The sheets of glass act as compound lenses, fracturing and refracting the light to specific focal points directly onto light sensitive paper to create indexical traces of light in negative. The ‘Transparencies’ are solarised darkroom inversions of the ‘Opacities’ converting them back to positives. These photograms or contact prints reveal, as one would expect, something of the hidden structure of glass and its peculiarity as neither a liquid nor a solid. But what couldn’t be anticipated was the strange, uncanny space created in this hybrid world of geometric, crystal structure and fluid, organic form. In the process of making the photograms a single millimeter movement of the glass from the photographic paper can dissolve crystal formations into visceral, organic shapes. The series celebrates an intimate and indexical connection between these two most dominant media of transparency in our culture – glass and photography.

The ‘Opacities’ and ‘Transparencies’ have been the result of over three years of darkroom explorations and experimentation. Resulting in a handful of unique photographic prints which make up the series on display.’

18/09/2025

I am delighted to announce that a selection of 5 images from my ‘Bridge’ series will be on show for Metal is Major.
A group show curated by .bee.ok as a part of

PV - 19th September 6:30-9:40pm


Bridge (2022-24) 8x10 inch Archival giclée prints.

Over the past 5 years I have been photographing the over-painted erasures of graffiti made by council workers in Brighton and London. The most recent group of these are the ‘Bridge’ and ‘Temple’ series which are photographs taken on two parallel slip-road bridges into London. The title ‘Bridge’ has a double meaning. Firstly, it’s the location of the photographs and secondly, I think of the images themselves as bridges between the worlds of visual experience: painting and photography; the gallery and the street.

As the series of photographs developed over several years the focus of attention shifted from the found, unintentional paintings and the various artists to which they inadvertently seemed to allude to, to an interested in the relation with the frame. Soft pastel colours juxtapose the rusted bleeding structure of the bridge which now spanned a separation in time: Edwardian England and the contemporary world and the framing devices of museums and engineers. 

Find the rest of the series on my website linked in my bio

05/08/2025

I am pleased to announce a piece from my ‘Opacities’ series has been selected for ‘In Praise of Darkness’.
A group show curated by and that will be held gallery in conjunction with and .fictions.

PV: 8th August 6:30-9:30.

Opacity (2024) 8 x 10 inch double exposed silver gelatin photogram.

Check out the rest of the series linked in my bio.

This particular work was made during my residency ❤️

16/06/2025

Fresh Salad x The Farm Summer residency

Ben Stezaker

Long Exposures (2025) sun faded books - Install

The ‘Long Exposures’ are a series of found sun-faded, cloth-covered hardback books collected over the last year, in which the ghost images of adjacent books or book ends have left their imprint as silhouettes. As the books are arranged and rearranged on bookshelves over years, a series of multiple exposures to ambient light create geometric collages of superimposed images of what has been. In a way, these are unintentional ready-made photographs which have been developed (without the human hand) over decades of sunlight exposure. Unlike most photographic processes where light creates darkness on sensitised paper, the light is removing the colour/ pigment and leaving an image of what was once present: light creating an image of light.

One piece in the series stands alone. Rather than being an image of a series of other books and objects, it is an image made through the dust cover of the book itself. The dust cover has acted as an intermediary negative and over time an inversion of the cover photograph has been imprinted onto the book cloth in negative.

Through conversation on the project with Fraser Carr Miles , I was introduced to a particular discontinued coloured card stock used for book covers. Fraser had had problems with it fading extremely quickly to short term light exposure. This gave me the idea of producing an image in the same manner and then allowing it to disappear with time.
I had taken a series of images of ‘Passages’ and apertures during a residency there. This was because some of the ‘Long Exposure’ shadow imprints I had collected reminded me of doors and windows. I thought it would be interesting to use these as acetate positives to exposure onto this card. I left them outside in the Farm Mews for the two-week duration of the residency. My plan is to then do an exhibition that will stage their disappearance.

I cannot thank .chie.art and from and from .artspace for putting on this residency and show and making it such a great experience.

11/01/2024

Exciting times 👀

📢 Exhibition Announcement: ‘Somewhere Means Something to Somebody’ by residents & - Opening party day Saturday 3rd February 2024, 16:00-19:00! Featuring

This exhibition marks the end of the inaugural Flatland Fututes Young Persons Studio Residency which has ran concurrently with the 2023 Turner Prize celebrating a spotlight on the artistic ecology of East Sussex as part of ! ✨

06/04/2023

Spectrum Photographic

07/10/2019

Carving practice ———
W.I.P ◾️▪️ @ University Of Brighton, Grand Parade