Canal and Road, Kyoto, Feb. 19, 1983

David Hockney created his first photocollage several decades after he had established himself as a leading figure in contemporary art. (Though he experimented with photography in the 1960s and 1970s, his first photocollage did not come to fruition until 1982.) According to Cameraworks: David Hockney, “From March, 1981, until June, 1983, David Hockney spent virtually all of his creative time in voracious experimentation with the camera. He shot thousands of pictures, and in the end produced more than 350 photocollages that ranged from intimate “sketches” to dizzying panoramas containing a myriad of details and hundreds of micro-perspectives.” [1] He began with a polaroid camera, photographing a subject from various perspectives; once the polaroids were in-hand and assembled, the piece was essentially finished. A second iteration of collages was born in the years that followed – no longer shot with a polaroid camera but with his Nikon 35mm or Pentax 110 single reflex camera; in these works (like Canal and Road), the actual photographing could take minutes, but assembling the prints often took hours. In photographing and assembling, Hockney had only one rule: never crop the prints. [2] As these works evolved, Hockney became “increasingly interested in the depiction of movement through space… movement as [people] walked, the movement of cars and trains, [the artist’s] own movement, walking or driving through the field of vision.” [3]

The idea of the photocollage appealed to Hockney for many reasons, among them that – by compiling photographs taken from slightly different angles at slightly different times – he could alter both the perspective and the scale of his images. They had the added benefit of acknowledging the artist’s Cubist influences: according to Hockney, “[t]he main point was that you read it differently. It wasn’t just a photograph. It was abstracted, stylized: the ideas were based on Cubism in the way that it filters things down to an essence… It worked so well that I couldn’t believe what was happening when I looked at it. I saw all these different spaces and I thought” ‘My god! I’ve never seen anything like this in photography.’ Then I was at the camera night and day.” [Excerpt from The David Hockney Foundation.]

According to Hockney: From the first day [creating Polaroid collages], I was exhilarated. First of all, I immediately realized 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, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world.” [4]