David Hockney and Photography

David Hockney is known to experiment across many mediums and, while primarily known for his paintings and prints, his photographic works are often overlooked. Photography has been central to Hockney’s practice since the 1960s. From 1964, he used photographs as the foundation for plotting complex compositions for large-scale paintings. By the 1970s, Hockney was using photography to serially document his life and experiences.

This said, Hockney’s approach to photography only properly shifted in 1982 when curator Alain Sayag invited him to mount a show of his own photographs at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This was pivotal, as Hockney began addressing the limitations of perspective in conventional point and shoot photography. He envisioned using the medium to create two-dimensional images with the ‘perspectival sophistication of Cubist paintings.’

Sayag suggested Hockney adopt the Polaroid – a form of instant print – to achieve this effect and to help him compose larger works. Hockney embraced the idea, employing the Polaroid to incorporate multiple perspectives within a single artwork. With this new methodology, Hockney produced 150 composite polaroid's in a matter of months, and by June of 1982 hosted his first photography exhibition: Drawing with a Camera held at André Emmerich Gallery in New York.

Attributed to his aversion of wide lens photography due to its distortive effect, his 1980s experiments derive from his attempts to conjure more comprehensive renderings of scenes, portraits, and landscapes. His first foray into photo manipulation manifested in what he termed his ‘joiners’ – collages comprising multiple images depicting the same subject matter, meticulously arranged to dictate narrative beyond the confines of a single frame.

Beginning rather simply, Hockney positioned his Polaroids in regimented grid-like structures to render scenes. He used these to map compositions for paintings, initially for landscapes that extended beyond the frame of a typical one-point-focus. The success of these works led to further experiments with more complex manipulations of perspective.

The works that follow more keenly observe mood, architecture, composition, and movement. Canal and Road (1983) is clearly inspired by Cubism, adopting its fragmented and abstracted forms to produce legible pictorial space. Hockney takes many photographs of the same scene from multiple perspectives to render images that extend beyond the confines of a regular picture. In many examples, he includes an image of his own footprints to mark the foreground of the composition; in others, such as here, the pavement rolls on from where we can imagine he is stood.

Hockney’s most technical explorations in photography manifest in his ‘photographic drawings’; departing from his joiners and his photographic collages, these new works employ complex digital technologies to generate advanced compositions. The three-dimensionality of these works makes them appear habitable.

Akin to his earlier experiments, Hockney meticulously photographs and maps together hundreds of images to render a single scene. Hockney and his studio assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, discovered the photogrammetric software Agisoft Photoscan in 2017. Prior to this, their renditions were cruder, and details were more manually rendered and pasted into the works. Agisoft is capable of stitching hundreds of images together to produce ‘three-dimensional approximation.’ Hockney feeds the images into the software and waits for hours for it to churn through them. The result: an uncanny rendition of a familiar space. Hockney then uses the outcome as a ‘backdrop’ for the manipulation that follows.

The Potted Palm, The Chairs and Two Chairs with People (2014) use the same digitally generated space to map their compositions. Each work has the heavy pleated beige curtain to the left, a large off-white square tiled floor, with an array of artworks adorning each of the walls. The room appears vast due to the objects scattered in the space. Our perception of how large the room is, is determined by our preconceived understanding of the size-regularity of objects. The implementation of shadows equally deems these spaces habitable. Furniture breaks through the foreground of the composition, further owing to the illusion that we, as the viewer, are standing within the space.

Wilkinson also assists Hockney in digitally rendering the three-dimensional objects such as chairs and tables. These are positioned within the scenes and occupied by images of family and friends. Windows and walls are covered with artworks – and so the entire experience becomes self-referential. These scenes become miniature art galleries, like a repository for his oeuvre.

Once assembled, Hockney made 360-degree digital tours within the confines of the approximated space. This heightened proximity for viewers prompted Hockney to add finishing touches to certain details, even to parts not initially seen in his photographic drawings. Hockney used paint in these instances, to affirm objects’ believability; he smoothed over shadows and highlighted other areas, rendering objects more tactile and thus realistic. This is especially clear in his 2018 works such as Seven Trollies, Six and a Half Stools, Six Portraits, Eleven Paintings, and Two Curtains. Due to these works’ size, the textures and shadows of objects like stools and easels are visible to the naked eye. They appear almost painterly in their rendering due to Hockney’s manual manipulation.

Hockney’s photographic works are playful while technically advanced, expanding his pre-existing interrogations of flattened and navigable space. His adoption of digital media is showcased here in its most complete form – with complex technologies entwining with manual painterly editing to showcase his artistic development and unwavering commitment to experimentation.

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