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Lot Essay
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Hockney used photography extensively as a visual diary, recording his friends and companions, and his travels around the world. These photographs were often used as source material for his paintings and prints (cf. lots 56 and 66) and were taken with a painter's eye for composition and colour. Although beautiful in their own right, Hockney saw his photographs as a useful compositional tool, a means to an end, rather than independent works of art. Acutely aware of the limitations of the camera, its static, single-point perspective, and its inability to provide a visual equivalent for our experience of seeing, he trenchantly described photographs as 'all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops - for a split second' (Lawrence Weschler, Cameraworks, Knopf, New York, 1984, quoted in: David Hockney: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 55)
In 1982, a visit from the curator Alain Seyag, who was mounting a show at the Pompidou Centre about painters and their photographs, initiated Hockney's first tentative attempts to overcome single-point perspective in photography. He embarked on a period of intensive experimentation that was to last four years. Subjects included portraits and group photographs of friends and family, interiors and architectural sites, as well as large scale landscapes.
The photocollages, or 'joiners' as Hockney calls them, taken with a small Pentax or Nikon camera, mimic the peripatetic movement of the eye. They attempt to capture something of the experience of seeing by charting the subtle effects of a glance or the turning of a head, by changing the camera's vantage point with each new shot. The photographs are then assembled and glued onto card. The results are lively and unpredictable, almost more painterly than photographic. As Anne Hoy, in her essay Hockney's Photocollages observes:
'He notes that the gaze moves perpetually, that visual experience is a composite of shifting views focused by interest and inflected by concept and memory. Sensations of depth and movement are intrinsic to eye sight, upholding the definition of perception known since Impressionism and seen in Cubism. While a single photograph can encapsulate only a frozen moment - Hockney calls such pictures one eyed - a collage of them suggests the composite experience of observation over time.' (David Hockney: A Retrospective, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 56)
In 1982, a visit from the curator Alain Seyag, who was mounting a show at the Pompidou Centre about painters and their photographs, initiated Hockney's first tentative attempts to overcome single-point perspective in photography. He embarked on a period of intensive experimentation that was to last four years. Subjects included portraits and group photographs of friends and family, interiors and architectural sites, as well as large scale landscapes.
The photocollages, or 'joiners' as Hockney calls them, taken with a small Pentax or Nikon camera, mimic the peripatetic movement of the eye. They attempt to capture something of the experience of seeing by charting the subtle effects of a glance or the turning of a head, by changing the camera's vantage point with each new shot. The photographs are then assembled and glued onto card. The results are lively and unpredictable, almost more painterly than photographic. As Anne Hoy, in her essay Hockney's Photocollages observes:
'He notes that the gaze moves perpetually, that visual experience is a composite of shifting views focused by interest and inflected by concept and memory. Sensations of depth and movement are intrinsic to eye sight, upholding the definition of perception known since Impressionism and seen in Cubism. While a single photograph can encapsulate only a frozen moment - Hockney calls such pictures one eyed - a collage of them suggests the composite experience of observation over time.' (David Hockney: A Retrospective, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 56)