David Hockney

David Hockney (born 1937) is an English painter, print maker and photographer. He was an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960’s and is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.  Hockney has made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Hockney was born with synaesthesia, he sees synesthetic colours in response to musical stimuli. In the early 1980’s, Hockney began to produce photo collages that he called ‘joiners’, in these Hockney took multiple photographs and arrange a patchwork to create a composition.

My Favourite Photograph

In this joiner photograph it appears that Hockney used natural daylight to capture it. This is because the colours are very vibrant and there is a natural level of contrast within the photograph. In the photographs that make up this collage, I think that a deep depth of field will have been used to ensure that the whole of the photograph is in focus. A shutter speed of 1/40 – 1/100 will have been used along with an ISO of 100 or 200 for this as the photographs making up the collage are sharp and have the correct amount of exposure.

There are lots of vibrant colours in this collage which catches the viewers eye, this creates a wider tonal range and more contrast between colours in the photograph. The majority of the collage is light, the only dark tones are in the trees and shadows. There is a texture in the ground in the collage which allows the viewer to see the photograph as more realistic and relate to it more. It is quite a 3D image as there are obviously subjects in the foreground and subjects in the background which get darker as they get further back.

This photograph is one of Hockey’s joiner photographs in which he would use polaroid prints and 35 mm commercially processed colour prints of a single subject to create a collage. The result of this joiner work has an affinity with Cubism, which is one of Hockney’s major aims – discussing the way human vision works.