David Hockney

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. 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 as a preparatory work, 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. He 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. Hockney reflected extensively on this process as connecting to the Cubist sense of multiple angles and especially of movement. These “multiples” convey a strong sense of movement, Hockney argued, in that you the viewer keep adjusting your imagined viewpoint as your eye travels from print to print. And of course by this means you can build up a single image that is many times wider in angle of view than the camera lens (the viewing angle of a standard 55mm lens for a 35mm format camera is about 45 degrees. Wide angle lenses increase the angle of view to about 75 degrees without obvious distortion, but the human angle of view, with eye movement, is about 180 degrees.)