This image was taken at my parent’s wedding in 1947, just two years after the end of the second-word war. This made me think about what memories my father had at this time. I know he was in Dresden soon after the horrific bombing. I wonder how he coped with such memories. Peer feedback was not positive, I think my Reidesque image has backed me into a corner with nowhere to go except creating a pastiche of Reid’s work.
The artist John Stezaker influenced image. I intend to alert the viewer to what my father has just been through less than two years before. What thoughts were going through his head at the time of his happiest day? Is it possible to forget the atrocities he had witnessed? Stezaker's work focused on found images from which he created deceptively simple montages which are both 'witty and poignant'.
My interpretation is not a copy of his work but uses his concept of the found picture. I introduced the image of the Churchill Tank (my father was in tanks most of the war), to mask my fathers face to inform the viewer that this is what happened to him, this is his memory. Stezaker quoted from the Guardian newspaper "When we look at a face, we assume that we are looking behind the face for a personality," and goes on to say "By making literal that behindness, I often create something that twists into an image of horror". (Guardian 2014)