Nature's Pencil: Inspiration: David Hockney
Hockney isn't generally thought of as a photographer, but I think that what he has done in photography is more significant than his painting and drawing.
Essentially the eye does not work like a camera. When we look at the world we scan a scene, building up our view from those elements to which we give our attention. As we move through a scene we see objects from many points of view, and attend more to those that are important to us generally as human beings, as well as to those that interest us personally.
In fact when we study human consciousness it is even more complex than that. Our minds or brains do so much preliminary processing that they do not even necessarily present information to consciousness in the same sequence as it is gathered!
Hockney believes that many, perhaps most, or even all orthodox photographs are lifeless, and that ultimately they are less real than good paintings and drawings because:
- A photograph fixes a single instant, so there is no sense of movement through time. An entire dimension of experience is lost.
- A photograph fixes a view from a single perspective (the one-eyed man looking through a hole). We have become accustomed to think of this as being "realistic", but in fact the camera simply mechanises one particular way of representing the world, which was developed in the Renaissance. Other approaches are possible, and in many ways superior, such as the Cubist approach of representing many aspects of a subject simultaneously.
Hockney points out that it is much more difficult to fake or alter a cubist image by modifying it after the fact than it is to modify a conventional photograph - whether for aesthetic, commercial, or political ends.
He has developed ways of producing multi-faceted photo-collages (which he calls "joiners") from hundreds of smaller photographic images, and has applied them to interiors, landscapes, portraits, groups of people, and still-lifes. Basically he has invented "Cubist photography".
I think Hockney is a bit unfair on the conventional photographer - one of the challenges of photography is to so arrange the elements of a scene that the eye is naturally led to explore it, creating a sense of movement - but his new approach opens huge new possibilities for photography, as well as creating some beautiful images.
Here is one of his "joiners": The Desk, July 1st 1984.
