David Hockney's Joiners

 

From Cameraworks by David Hockney with Laurence Weschler:

…Hockney began making what he referred to as “Joiners.”… “At first I was just going through all this because the result, the depiction of the particular subject, came out looking clearer and more true to life than a single wide-angle version of the same subject… However, fairly early on I noticed that these joiners also had more presence than ordinary photographs. With five photos, for instance, you were forced to look five times. You couldn’t help but look more carefully.”

“My main argument was that a photograph couldn’t be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that?” Hockney led me back into the studio and picked up a magazine, thumbing through randomly to an ad, a photograph of a happy family picknicking on a hillside green “See? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have- or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them- they stare back, blankly- and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world form the point of view of a paralysed cyclops- for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”