David Hockney’s Photocollages

Hockney began creating photographic collages in 1982, developing an entirely new medium which served as an antidote to the limitations of perspective in conventional point and shoot photography. Throughout his career, a primary concern for the artist has been accurately capturing the experience of seeing. Hockney asserts that this experience is fundamentally shaped by memory and subjectivity, explaining that ‘the camera sees geometrically, but we see psychologically.’

These photographic experiments stemmed from Hockney’s fascination with multi-point perspective which informed his approach to landscape painting in the preceding decades. Finding wide angle photography to be too distortive, his first foray into photo manipulation manifested in what he termed his ‘joiners’ – collages comprising multiple images depicting the same subject matter, meticulously arranged to dictate narrative beyond the confines of a single frame. Unlike his Composite Polaroids, previous photographic grid experiments which were constrained by the white borders of a Polaroid, he used a Pentax 110 camera to produce seamless images that flowed into one another. These joiners are a precursor to his Moving Focus series, as well as his expansive landscape paintings of the 1990s, which employ multiple canvases to immerse the viewer in the composition.

Hockney envisaged these early photographic collages to create two-dimensional images with the ‘perspectival sophistication of Cubist paintings.’ A favourite technique was to include multiple expressions of the same sitter in a portrait, thereby offering a more complex portrayal of personality alongside a palpable sense of movement. Hockney was clearly inspired by Cubism, putting fragmented and abstracted forms into lucid pictorial space and also experimenting with line and shape that, also like Cubism, offer greater context to the viewer. Hockney’s photocollages offer a unique approach to composition that resonates with the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Scholars have noted that Hockney’s works embody the essence of Cubism, as Alfred Barr described it: ‘Cubism was distinguished by a flattening of volume and space, the overlapping of transparency of planes and simultaneity of points of view.’ Hockney’s photocollages embrace these concepts through selective cropping, manipulation and the integration of multiple viewpoints, reflecting his ongoing exploration of perspective, geometry, colour and movement. In this way, he captures the everyday in a manner that is both innovative and inextricable from art historical context.

This redefined interest in photography was later explored in Hockney’s investigative text: Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, published in 2001. Here, Hockney explores the history of perspective in art while comparing his own practices with photography to those of the Old Masters. He posits that many master painters used tools like the camera obscura, camera lucida and mirrors to achieve a hyper-realistic painting style.

Camera obscura is a natural phenomenon whereby a beam of light is shone through a tiny hole into a dark room, resulting in an inverse projection of what can be seen beyond the hole, onto the opposite inner wall. The camera lucida is the optical device that projects and inverts this image onto the artist’s drawing surface, so that the image can be traced. Hockney argues that these images were essentially staged, using light and a deep understanding of composition, akin to his own manipulation of spatial perception. Hockney’s text expands on this, comparing his own photographic works to these ancient techniques. Hockney’s photocollages comprise part of an ongoing effort to render convincing, spatially coherent perspectives – undoubtedly rooted in the Old Master tradition.

Hockney also used his photocollages to capture the experience of encountering new places for the first time, from Japan and New York to Yosemite National Park, alongside scenes from everyday life at home. Rather than relying on a single photograph as a snapshot of his travels, Hockney assembled multiple images of the same subject into carefully constructed compositions which extend beyond the limits of one frame. These fragmented arrangements reflect the way in which perception works – partial, shifting, and filtered through the lens of memory.

In February 1983, Hockney travelled to Japan to speak at a conference on paper in art. Photographs taken during the trip became the foundation for collages such as Gregory Reading in Kyoto, Feb. 1983, which depicted his former partner and long-term muse, Gregory Evans. Fragmented details, including a map of Kyoto, a book of haikus, and a Japanese garden in the background, offer clues to the setting while emphasising comprehensive observation over fixed perspective. The stillness of this scene, depicting Gregory peacefully reading, allowed Hockney to ‘put time into’ photography by capturing subtle shifts during a period of quiet observation. As Hockney explained, ‘there is no such thing as objective vision’, since perception is always shaped by memory, accumulating with each glance. Through these collages, Hockney simultaneously captures several moments in time – an experience crystallised in the mind’s eye. By meticulously dating these works and recording the location alongside a description of the scene through a handwritten inscription beneath the collage, these works serve as a visual diary of his travels during the 1980s.

In recent years, Hockney’s most technical explorations in photography may be seen in his ‘photographic drawings’; departing from his composite Polaroids and photographic collages, these later works employ digital technologies to generate complex compositions. To create these works, Hockney meticulously photographed and mapped together hundreds of images to produce a single scene. In 2017 Hockney and his studio assistant Jonathan Wilkinson came across the photogrammetric software Agisoft Photoscan. Prior to this, their renditions were cruder, and details were often created manually and pasted into the works. Agisoft is capable of stitching hundreds of images together to produce a ‘three-dimensional approximation’ – digitally generated spaces conceived to allow the artist to play with space. To produce photographic drawings, Hockney feeds disparate images into the software and waits for hours for it to churn through them, resulting in an uncanny version of a familiar space to be used as a ‘backdrop’ for the compilation that follows. Three-dimensional objects, such as tables and chairs, are positioned within the scenes, as are images of friends and family.

In his later photographic drawings, Hockney made 360-degree digital tours within the confines of the approximated space. Hockney used paint to smooth shadows and highlight other areas, making objects more tactile and thus more realistic. These creations are both technically radical and playful, as demonstrated in Sparer Chairs, a fabricated world where walls are covered with other Hockney artworks, making the entire experience self-referential. This visual repository summarises the artist’s experiments with perspective. The scene becomes a miniature art gallery: the arrangement of empty chairs denotes an absent sitter, while the familiar face of Olympic diver Tom Daley can be seen in the background. Determined to use the camera to produce something more complex and truer to life than one-dimensional pictures, Hockney’s technologies have resulted in new art forms which reflect his unwavering commitment to experimentation.