That's the Way I See It

4 ideas

1. Polaroid grids become the photocollage joiners

   In 1982 Hockney began assembling grids of Polaroids, then collages of dozens to hundreds of 35mm prints, each shot from a slightly different position and moment. The work culminated in 'Pearblossom Highway, 11–18th April 1986', a roadside scene in the California desert built from hundreds of photographs taken over about a week. He used the joiners to show that a camera could be made to record looking, which moves and accumulates, rather than a single frozen glance.

2. One-point perspective locks the viewer outside

   Renaissance one-point perspective, and the camera that inherits it, assumes one eye held motionless at one instant, so the viewer stands outside the scene looking through a window. Real vision is binocular, moving and spread across time. A picture built from many viewpoints can therefore be more truthful to experience and can place the viewer inside the space.

3. Scroll painting as a journey, not a view

   The viewer travels along the landscape instead of looking at it from a fixed spot. Hockney used this 'moving focus' to argue that pictures can hold duration and wandering attention, which Western perspective shuts out, and he explored it in his 1988 film 'A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China'.

4. Cubism as a more realistic realism

   Hockney reads Picasso's Cubism as a truer depiction of how we know things, not as abstraction or distortion. It combines several views of a face or object gathered over time and from memory into one image. On this reading, a Picasso portrait showing profile and frontal eye together records the experience of looking at a person more fully than a photograph does.

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