Hockney on Chemicals
David Hockney talking about his dislike of photographic images:
During the last several months I've come to realize that it has something to do with the amount of time that's been put into the image. I mean, Rembrandt spent days, weeks, painting a portrait. You can go to a museum and look at a Rembrandt for hours and you're not going to spend as much time looking as he spent painting-- observing, layering his observations, layering the time. Now, the camera was actually invented long before the chemical processes of photography- it was being used by artists in Italy in the sixteenth century... But in terms of what we're talking about it didn't really matter, because the process still took time, the hand took time, and though a 'camera' was used, there's no mistaking the layered time...
No, the flaw with the camera comes with the invention of the chemical processes in the 19th century. It wasn't that noticable at first. In the early days, the exposure would last for several seconds, so that the photographs were either of people, concentrated and still, like Nadar's, or of still lifes or empty streets scenes as in Atget's Paris. You can look at those a bit longer before you blank out. But as the technology improved, the exposure time was compressed to a split second. And the reason you can't look at a photograph for a long time is because there's virtually no time in it-- the imbalance between the two experiences, the first and second lookings, is too extreme.
...And then continuing on about his own work with photographs, which he calls "Joiners":
From that first day I was exhilirated. First of all, I immediately realized that I'd conquered my problem with time in photography. It takes time to see these pictures-- you can look at them for a long time, they invite that sort of looking. But, more importantly, I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all-at-once but rather in discrete, seperate glimpses which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world.
Excerpted from the monograph Camera Works
--Posted 07/10/03 01:08AM