Throughout my lifetime, I've seen David Hockney described as the "world's greatest living painter". Sadly, that no longer applies: the artist born in Bradford, England in 1937 died yesterday, one month short of his 89th birthday. Most tributes will focus on his famous paintings: his swimming pools, his Yorkshire landscapes, his double portraits. But I think there's an added reason to celebrate his life: his photography work genuinely pushed things forward.
This innovation was born of personal frustration with what a camera could achieve. "Photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops, for a split second," he once said, pithily. But rather than letting that limitation put him off the medium, he burned with the desire to push it forward.
Defining the problem
It was 1967 when Hockney bought his first 35mm and started using photographs as reference material for paintings. But the thing that frustrated him was this. A photograph freezes a scene from a single fixed point, at a single moment in time, through a single lens. Yet that's not how human beings see.
We scan, we glance, we move. We look at something for ten seconds and register far more information than any shutter could ever capture. With the latter, he told the Smithsonian in 1984: "You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there really." For a painter who'd spent years studying Cubism and who understood, intuitively, that art needed to account for the experience of looking, this was a serious challenge.
The solution arrived accidentally. In the early 1980s, working on a painting of a room in LA, Hockney stuck some Polaroids together as a kind of mood board. Looking at the result, he realized he'd created something new: a sense of moving through the space, of time passing within a single image.
Once he'd had this eureka moment, he burst into creative life. Working with curator Alain Sayag, Hockney threw himself into what became known as his "joiners": collages made from dozens or hundreds of individual photographs, arranged to build a larger scene. He produced 150 composite Polaroid works in a matter of months, and held his first photography exhibition, Drawing with a Camera, at New York's André Emmerich Gallery in 1982.
These weren't just random collages, but philosophical statements about the nature of time, space and the act of looking. To take just one example: his joiner of Bradford, Yorkshire, shot in the summer of 1985, shows a woman in a beige jacket appear multiple times across the image as she walks past. Hockney was tracking her path with his camera, moving from left to right, so she appears again and again as she walks through the scene.
Because we see her in several positions, we know exactly how long she took to pass by: the duration of her walk is written into the structure of the image. And the point was: no single photograph can do that.
Cameras and Cubism
Much of this was inspired by Hockney's relationship with Cubism, a style of art that shows an object or scene from several angles at once, instead of from one fixed viewpoint. His joiners were his attempt to bring that thinking into photography, to make a photograph that worked the way a painting by Picasso worked. Canal and Road, Kyoto (1983) is a clear example, its fragmented, interlocking panels producing a sense of architectural depth that no single exposure could achieve.
A standard 55mm lens on a 35mm camera sees roughly 45 degrees. A wide-angle extends that to around 75 degrees without obvious distortion. Human vision, with normal eye movement, spans about 180 degrees. Hockney's joiners were reaching for that full human field of view; perhaps messily, but certainly meaningfully.
Long before smartphones made panoramic photography a tap-and-sweep gesture, before computational photography began automatically stitching images together, Hockney was doing this by hand; thinking through the problems of field of view, perspective and time that programmers would later build into software algorithms.
The digital years
Hockney never stopped pushing. In later years he moved through iPhone photography, iPad drawing and multi-camera video installations. The thinking behind all of it, though, can be traced back to those Polaroid experiments.
His 2001 book Secret Knowledge, for example, took the notion that the old masters had used optical devices such as the camera obscura and camera lucida to achieve hyper-realistic effects, and extended the same argument back through art history. The basic point was characteristically Hockney: that the relationship between the manufactured image and the human eye has always been complicated, contested, and well worth arguing about.
To photographers today, Hockney's legacy is more practical than it might first appear. His central insight, that a photograph is always a reduction of experience, is worth thinking about every time you raise a viewfinder.
The question isn't how to capture a scene; it's how to capture the experience of being in that scene. Sometimes a single frame does it perfectly. Often, it doesn't. What you do with that information is up to you.
