A Matter of Perspective

“Photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops-for a split second.” — David Hockney

As a result, in the 1980s Hockney experimented with the idea of photography, the equipment and the way in which it had been used. Rather than using one single image to capture a scene, he used many individual Polaroids or pictures from a film camera to build out the scene. These resulted in montages or joiners that, he felt, more accurately showed the perspective as seen by the human eye.

The Juxtapose website (https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/david-hockney-s-joiners/) shows a number of his artworks if you'd like to check out the results.

I have put together a few of these in the past, so set about creating another three. Unlike the previous challenges, this one has taken several weeks to complete due to the work involved in putting these type of images together.

Week Seventeen - Joiners

Location 1 - The Colosseum, Rome

Following a somewhat disappointing sunrise over the Tiber, I went on a stroll towards the Colosseum. As it was still early, I pretty much had the place to myself.

I tried a number of joiners here from different sides of the building, but settled on this. I forgot to add my feet into the composition (a Hockney trait), so added them afterwards :)

Location 2 - Kubuswoningen, Rotterdam

Ah yes - my favourite yellow houses. It's fair to say this one nearly drove me mad! The buildings aren't exactly straight forward to start with and then attempting to alter the perspective a second time was somewhat of a challenge.

Lesson learned - take a photo of the whole scene first so you know how to fit the pieces together afterwards!

Location 3 - Granary Square, King Cross, London

I remembered my feet! Hoorah.

This was captured on my iPhone and Photoshop did a great job of assembling this. I think I needed to be closer into the scene and the individual image quality could be better. One for a revisit and switch the phone to higher quality image capture.

In Summary

Appreciating these are not to everyone's taste, I love them and will definitely create more. Whilst I don't subscribe to Hockney's view about 'normal' photography, joiners definitely bring a smile to my face and the perspective change makes me approach the scene in a different way.

Next time - Self Portraits