David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
Brunelleschi, looking through a hole at a street in Florence, makes a depiction of it from a fixed viewpoint... The photographic process is simply the invention in the 19th century of a chemical substance that could “freeze” the image projected from the hole in the wall, as it were, onto a surface. It was the invention of the chemicals that was new, not the particular way of seeing... So the photograph is, in a sense, the end of something old, not the beginning of something new.
It’s time to debate images, especially when someone’s going to prison for downloading them.
Ordinary photography, it seems to me, is obsessed with subject matter, whereas [my] photographs are not principally about their subjects. Or rather, they aren’t so much about things as they are about the way things catch your eye.
Like that, cold turkey, I consciously abandoned the camera. I don’t want to look through it again. No more pinholes! Enough of those claustrophobically constricting edges.
It’s not that I despised photography
ever, it’s just that I’ve always distrusted the claims that were made on its behalf—claims as to greater reality or authenticity.
People feel that the world depicted through photography is absolutely real. But it’s not. That’s just an aspect of reality.
The best portrait photographs are those that capture in a fraction of a second a period of time that looked as though it had been longer. Yet this also results in a certain static aspect to the face. The face must not be caught in a bearing that is too suggestive of a short period of time... for over an hour and a half, I tried to include a variety of looks, glances and expressions, all of which might synthesize into a living portrait of that person.
... I discovered in photography that as things get closer to you, it gets more and more difficult to see, more and more difficult to piece together. It made me believe that the most interesting and mystical space we have is here, close to us, and not in outer space.
