Joiners…
My process of connecting multiple images together was inspired by a series of works by British artist David Hockney (if i’ts not already obvious). During the seventies and eighties, Hockney explored the use of what he described as Joiners. Using prints or polaroids, Hockney would composite a subject or scene from multiple images. Both the subject and photographer would move during the process instilling the end result with a narrative rather than capturing a moment.
Hockney suggested that photography lacked a sense of time. A rather unreal frozen moment. The process is instantaneous as opposed to painting, which develops over time. The composition of a joiner is produced in the same way one constructs a drawing. Some areas of a scene are ignored, others are looked at in detail. Hockney believed that the joiners extended photography. By drawing with images he gave them a narrative.
The works intentionally resemble the cubist aesthetic, analysing the way human vision works. Like Hockney’s joiners, cubist artists depicted subjects from multiple view points to show them in a greater context. In reducing natural objects to their basic forms, these artists explored the fundamental ways in which we see. By breaking up and reassembling subjects in an abstract form, often using interesecting angles to distort the sense of space, cubist paintings expressed the plural viewpoint with which the human eye sees the world.
Although I do not consider my own work to question the specific nature of how humans see, the sense of narrative and collapsing of space achieved by Hockney and the Cubists has clearly had a direct influence upon my work.
In terms of narrative, I wanted to visualise the transience of modern day urban spaces. As described in my research proposal, Manovich’s ideas of augmentation suggest that we experience spaces in a more dynamic than in the past. Transport moves people physically faster within cities and new technologies such as phones and web devices draw attention toward spaces that may not be within our immediate locality.
Photography allows me to situate my audience within a location (the pedestrian) and using cubist like joiners I can create a sense of time around that viewpoint. Photomontage enables me to distort the boundaries between locations to warp not only perspectives, but time as well. I see the layering and blending of images as adding to Manovich’s idea of augmentation, suggesting muliple experiences within a space at a given time.
It is interesting to note Hockney’s comparison between his joiner photographs and the medium of film. In an experiment he completed a joiner documenting a friend bringing out cups of tea to his garden. This work went on to become ‘Fredda bringing Ann and Me a Cup of Tea’ (1983). After taking the photographs, he filmed Fredda repeating the action.
Whereas a film camera draws a line of time, the joiners exist on a flat plain and are seen both all at once and separately. With film, time is opposed onto. You are forced to look at events for a given amount of time and must follow them in the sequence that they are presented. A joiner however, can be viewed and analysed as many times as one wishes to do so. A viewer steps out of time in a sense, rather than being guided through it. Although Hockneys experiemnts took place before the advent of digital video and DVDs, I think the principal still remains.
In this sense, the joiners break the notion of a frame. a viewer is more free to view the images as they please. In addition to this, the edges of the frame become a part of the image. Rather than filling a frame and cropping images at the edge, their is a more open sense of space.
I also like this idea a less controlled perspective when applied to walking. When we walking, it is possible to consider direction. Focus of attention is more selected. In a car, bus or train, passengers are forced to view surroundings within a set of constraints, provided by the road or train tracks.
The output I have generated in the second half of the year has been primarily photography based. Although I had anticipated using elements of video, 3D and graphics, I haven’t felt the need to go beyond the appropriation of my phtography work. I suppose I feel that these pictures provide me with enough shapes, textures and colours to communicate what I need. Also, the photographic process involves exploring locations. Susan Sontag seems to sum up my methods rather well…
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”
I think the act of photographing goes slightly further though. In a sense, I am not only revealing the picturesgue, I am also mapping the areas and structures that I encounter. When I look at the body of work I’ve produced so far, the level of mapping I’ve achieved is actually rather obsessive. When attempting to capture a building with the intention of rebuilding it with photographs, I try to find as many different angles as possible. I move around the building looking for interesting elements to the structure and take both wide and close up shots. Essentially I collect hundreds of images whilst exploring the city to allow me as much freedom as possible when in computer.
“…the most grandiose result og the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images.”
“To collect photographs is to collect the world”
Susan Sontag
In this sense, my Hockney-esque joiners are very much in line with other mapping projects such as google earth and street view. In fact, the idea that photography as whole, from amateur snappers to modern surveillance, is mapping the whole is very relevant to my work. I suppose in distorting the locations that I map I am trying to highlight and parody the fixation that the world now has of capturing everything in camera.
