David Hockney is an English photographer and artist who was born in 1939. He is well known for his many influential pop-art pieces throughout the 60’s and his original photocollages he manually created throughout the 80’s called ‘joiners’.
Hockney’s joiners use a distinctive style, making his final piece look similar to a painting due to the way he’s chosen to piece them together. He chooses to combine his photos and alter the original landscape to his liking rather than recreating the subject exactly. He likes to focus on the space in each joiner and rearranges objects as he sees fit, the most famous example of this being his joiner ‘Pearblossom Highway No. 2’.
The image at the top is Hockey’s famous joiner ‘Pearblossom Highway No. 2’, a photocollage he created of the actual Pearblossom Highway [which can be seen in the image underneath it]. In order to create the joiner, Hockney took photos using a variety of perspectives over the course of multiple days with a film camera and post-development stuck each image together. He changed the positions of some of the objects to make the image his own, trying to represent the passing of time rather than just remaking the real location by hand.
Hockney’s method takes a lot of time and careful placement as he used hundreds, if not thousands, of images in this piece alone, all of which he stuck down manually over a series of days.
Some more of David Hockney’s joiners:
