David Hockney

David Hockney is an English painter, stage designer, photographer, draughtsman and printmaker. He is based in Bridlington although he also maintains a base in London. Hockney is considered an important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960's and is established as one of the most influential British artists of the Twentieth Century.

I am looking at his photographic collection "joiners". These are a collection of photo-montages. Which are photographs stitched together to create one whole image. He does this by taking lots of different images of one place then working these all together to create one big image. Hockney uses small polaroid snaps or photo-lab prints of a single image.

Hockney created these photo-collage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He reffered to them as "joiners". He used different techniques but the one i like the most is where he would take lots of polaroid images of one subject and lay them in a grid layout. The subject would usually move while being photographed so that the outcome would suggest movement and motion seen from the photographers perspective. Another method he developed would be to move the camera around the subject giving a slightly different perspective and almost producing a more 3D effect with a larger spectrum of the subject seen in the image rather than in a normal image.

Hockney's creation of the "joiners" came about by accident. He noticed a lot of images in the late 60's were created using wide angle lenses giving a distorted view. At the time he was working on a painting of a living room in LA, he decided to take polaroid shots of the room as he walked through it and glue them together not intending for them to make a composition of their own or work in any way he just wanted to see the perspective. After creating the final composition he realised that it told a story in a much better way as if the viewer were moving through the room. After he discovered this he decided to work with photography more and stopped painting for a while to divulge in this idea thoroughly.