David Hockney

David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsmen, printmaker, stage designer and photographer born on the 9th July 1937. He is an important figure within the pop art movement of the 1960's and he is considered one of the most influential British artist of the 20th century. In the early 1980's, Hockney began prodding photo collages which we now call photo joiners. Using polaroid or photolab-prints of a single subject and then arranging them in a patchwork fashion to make a different composition. Because the separate images are taken from slightly different angles and different perspectives, his work  relates to cubism. 

I chose to look at Hockney's work because I think his photo joiners are very complex and they are put together very well.  

This is one of David Hockney's photo joiner, this photo joiner was taken of a street with two trees. This image is composed of many separate small images and Hockney has put them back together to recreate the street. I think this images very effective because although the smaller images do not match up perfectly they still fit together well to create a larger image.

This is another of Hockney's photo joiners, in this image he has taken images from a few different angles so this image does not look true to the object. I like this image because it is very abstract and different to the original object and I think Hockney has put the images together very well. 

This is one of Hockney's photo joiners of a road. This photo joiner is made of many small images however he has taken so many that he has been able to put them together to make this very true to how the road would look. Although we can see that this is a photo joiner, it is put together very well so that we can imagine exactly how the landscape looked from Hockney's point of view.

This is a photo joiner with Hockney created of an elderly woman's face, this photo joiner is very different because he has taken the images from different angles and also from different distanced so that  some of her facial features are different sizes in different areas of the image. I like this because it is taken of a face so we know exactly how it should look however because he has taken the images in such an abstract form that we cannot see her face very easily. 

Influence 

David Hockney's work influenced me because he was the biggest photo joiner photographer. He is also the only photo-joiner photographer I have looked at therefore his work was the best standard I had looked at. His work is also influential because he uses different styles within his photo-joiners, for example in some of his photo joiners he makes it very realistic however in some others he uses different angles which makes the, less realistic.

This is one example of my photo joiners, this image was influenced by David Hockney's photo joiner of the street. I would have liked to have replicated it more closely by photographing a street also however, I could not do this within college and I think my photo joiner of this building is quite similar. I have made mine slightly different to Hockney's due to using bigger images whereas Hockney's are very close up and detailed in comparison.

Summary

When I originally looked at Hockney's work I did not like it very much as I thought that they didn't fit together very well however once i'd learnt more about photo-joiners I understood his images slightly better. I also like how he uses different styles within his work.