Photography: David Hockney and Joiner Photography

While getting ready for the South Bank Show, Hockney lets a camera crew follow his motions in creating a new piece. His joiner photography attempts to create photography with greater feeling of time and space, opposed to traditional photography or video. Hockney says that joiner photography captures a scene better than a video camera and challenges the crew to capture a scene with video and then with joiner photography. After they capture the same moments in a traditional camera, develop the photos and Hockney assembles them (even though two rolls were destroyed in the process), they compare the methods. The joiner photography captures all of the elements in the ten-second scene at the same moment. The viewer can look back and forth between elements of the piece and never lose the other elements. The video, however, does not allow for you to stop looking at the subject, Fredda, to look at a tree and then go back to the subject, it goes all at once.

Hockney felt a dissatisfaction with traditional photography, the lack of time shown in the frozen, unreal, lifeless motion. In painting, you can tell that there are hours and hours put into completing the work, but with photography you take it in fractions of a second. The viewer looks at the setting for longer than the camera does.

Joiner photography creates the illusion of space, but the feeling of time that it creates is real, you know it took time to create the larger image of several photos of the scene, shown in Hockney’s works of his home, or the Crossword Puzzle.  You can manipulate the many photos to express what is happening in the moment, or the character of the people in the photographs.

Watching this segment was really helpful and cool to see David Hockney at work, he was a little brash but he makes really great work. I think the purpose of watching this video was to explore the idea that this technique of creating joiner photography could contain more power in expressing a moment that video, which before I saw this I thought was obviously the best way. And we are trying to emulate his style in a way, literally or an interpretation, so I think it was really valuable to see more of Hockney’s work.