David Hockney

Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and He referred to them as "joiners".[6] He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.

Hockney's creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted.

He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room.

Hockney began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach, he later returned to painting

Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April 1986 # (190 Kb); Photographic collage, 198 x 282 cm (78 x 111 in); It took over 700 photographs to create this work.

The Artist’s Mom

Student Sample Works