David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]

 …the reason you can’t look at a photograph for a long time is because there’s virtually no time in it—the imbalance between the two experiences, the first and second lookings, is too extreme. 
 When is the present? When did the past end and the present occur, and when does the future start? Ordinary photography has one way of seeing only, which is fixed, as if there is kind of an objective reality, which simply cannot be. Picasso... knew that every time you look there’s something different. There is so much there but we're not seeing it, that’s the problem. 
 Any photographer will tell you that the one cardinal rule of photography is that when you pick up the camera and look at things through it, you are very, very deeply conscious of edges. It is the edges that make the composition in a photograph and it is what you leave there that will enable you to see things in the middle. The amateur photographer is the person who is not aware of edges—the casual snapper just points the camera at something without noticing the composition that’s going to result. But the composition is only made by the edges. 
 …I’ve come to see that [artist Robert] Irwin was right about that ban on photographing his work; I wish I’d imposed a similar ban regarding my own from the outset. I mean, no one can come upon one of my paintings in a museum, say, and simply see it; instead they see the poster in their college dorm or the dentist’s office or the jacket on the book they are reading, all sorts of second-rate mediations getting in the way of experiencing the work as if from scratch. 
 …I’ve long felt that the one aspect of photography that seems to have let us down is, actually, landscape. Photography seems to be rather good at portraiture, or can be. But it can’t tell you about space, which is the essence of landscape… Even Ansel Adams can’t quite prepare you for what Yosemite looks like when you go through that [Wawona] tunnel and you come out the other side. 
 Cubism was about the destruction of a fixed way of looking. A fixed position implies we are standing still, that even the eye is still. Yet we all know our eyes move constantly, and the only time they stop moving is when we’re dead—or when we’re staring. And if we’re staring, we’re not really looking. That is the problem with the single frame photograph: all you can actually do is stare at it. Your eyes cannot wander around in it, because of its inherent lack of time. 
 The camera is a medium is what I suddenly realized. It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby—it's a tool. It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. It’s as if I, like most ordinary photographers, had previously been taking part in some long-established cultures in which pencils were used only for making dots—there’s an obvious sense of liberation that comes when you realize you can make lines! 
 The convention of the blur comes from photography; it’s what happens when motion is compressed onto a chemical plate. We’ve seen so many photos of blurs that we now think we actually see them in the world. But look sometime: you don’t. 
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