PORTRAITS: STRANGERS NO LONGER STRANGERS, NOW
ACQUAINTANCES, FRIENDS, LOVERS…

PHOTO-MONTAGES BY: BASIL ALKAZZI

In the Spring of 1985 after a very creative Autumn and Winter
painting I strained, bruised and overworked a tendon in my
right arm. My Greek doctor correctly diagnosed it as an
"Artist elbow" and promptly prescribed a suppository,
despite my protestations that the pain was in my elbow and
nowhere else. They were pain-relieving ones, as I was to
discover later, when the flood never came. Unable to paint
or write, and with my desire and need to create totally
stifled, I undertook long travels without an aunt. In San
Francisco Hockney Paints the Stage opened at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, which I went to see, and as a result
also saw an extensive range of photographic exhibitions, and
in particular Val Talberg's surreal photo-montages by a
negative process, as well as Ray K. Metzkler's photo-collage
composites: A Maze in Philadelphia, and Max Yavano's
California Street aroused an interest in my mind's eye.

And so I started playing with my Japanese camera, and
assembled photo-montages which curiously, to a certain extent,
gratified my creative desires, House-scapes of the Painted
Ladies of San Francisco, moved and drifted to Xania, in Crete,
where an entire summer was spent photographing the old Turkish
quarter at the mouth of the Venetian harbour of the town, the
Summer of which had been intended for painting. And although
on a previous Summer, Xania had inspired a series of
paintings, the photo-montage images in no way relate to my
work on canvas and paper- But how could they? And why should
they.

The end results were exhibited in London and New York the
following year.

For me, two processes of creativity take place, one is in
assembling the montage in one's mind's eye as one photographs,
and later when fitting them together in actuality, one
recreates that 'moment' , and is able to do so with variations,
though very much more limiting than drawing or painting.

It is good art? Bad art? Or is it art at all? Frankly I
don't care, I enjoy it, and that's all that matters.

I have pursued photography thereafter, whenever there was a
lull in my painting, and as an alternate form of creativity.
Recently I embarked on series of portraits of people I knew,
had met, was introduced to, chatted up, or was chatted-up by
strangers who are no longer strangers.

A MUSEUM NECCA PUBLICATION, BROOKLYN, CONNECTICUT. 1988.
DIRECTOR: HENRY RISEMAN;  CURATOR: EVA J. PAPE
Library of Congress Catalogue Card No: 88-62700


Published by:
Museum NECCA; New England Center for Contemporary Art,
USA 1988.
Basil Alkazzi- All Rights Reserved 1988
Edited by Henry Riseman, Director of Museum NCCA
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 88-62700

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT 1998 by BASIL ALKAZZI  
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED UNDER INTERNATIONAL
AND PAN-AMERICAN COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS.