For this project I decided to follow David Hockney’s work on photo montage.

David Hockney was born on the 9th July 1937, he is known for being an English painter, stage designer, print maker and photographer.

As a young artist his paintings were mainly about literacy learning, here he also started to in cooperate his homosexuality in his art, this was present in the painting “We Two Boys Clinging Together”

He studied in Bradford College of Art from the years of 1953-1957, although at this time most men was obliged to join the army, Hockney decided to spend his 2 mandatory years helping at the hospital.

Later on in his career he started to gather Polaroid pictures that he had taken and make them into a bigger picture, this began his path into photo montage.

These are just a few examples of his work on photo montage:

Analysis one of his pieces

This image is an example of how David Hockney took the idea of photo montage and interpreted it into his own work.

Visual: The colour scheme is mainly an autumnal theme with browns, oranges and green. The shape of the image is 3D due to the overlapping of images, this shows the “photmontage” effect in the photograph, this also shows the scattered layout of the image as this disorientated set up allows the audience to see multiple “scenes” in one image. Here due to the distance of which the photo was taken, I suspect that many of these photos were cropped in order to create this scattered arrangement. This also allows the image not to be over crowded as although there are alot of images these have been cropped to make this effective. Their is no certain viewpoint in the image for the eye as the audiences eye will continuously be moving in order to comprehend the photograph which is what David Hockney wanted. Their is definitely a surface illusion as although this is one image, there are many facial reactions and as the images purposely dont match it brings the audiences’ attention upon the various scenarios. And again due to the disorientated layout their is no clear foreground, midground and background; however it is clear that the main focus of the image are on these two men

Conceptual: I believe that the main idea of this image made by David hockney is to share a small story though the multiple photos in photograph. The two men, although unclear, seem to be having a good time due to their smiles in facial expression. This photo can have various meanings, it could symbolise the support of homosexuality, friendship, memories being made or even just two people enjoying each others company. In my opinion I think this image represents the 1980s due to the “warm tone memory” effect and the displeasing jumpers.

Technical: Here, Hockney had used natural lighting in his images, this helps give a natural look to the image, this technique is also effective as when it’s more sunny the photos would have more brightness in the image which makes the images stand out. The focal point are the two men however due to the amount of photos taken the focal point varies. The images are clear and dont seem to have any motion blur. The image seems to be in higher sensitivity with a coarser grain, I think this gives the image an older feel. Texture is present on the pavement which helps to add to add a more detailed image. The temperature is warm which helps to again evokes an old memory effect. There also seems to be a slight orange autumnal color cast.