Hockney on photography's failings

[Struan Gray]

I've just returned from a trip to the UK. While there I read an interview with David Hockney where he articulates many of the niggling problems I have with photography as an expressive artform.

Hockney has, and has always had, a rather younger-brother resentment towards photography, and his criticisms tend to lack grace and generosity. He also has a tendency to absolutism about the ideas which drive him. But behind the grating of the plain-talking Yorkshireman, there's the ring of truth.


Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I’ve always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.

You can read the interview here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8782275/The-many-layers-of-David-Hockney.html

[Darin Boville]

Thanks Struan,

This seems to be from the book listed at the end of the article. Just ordered it...There's also a DVD....

--Darin

[Struan Gray]

I've ordered a copy too, but it's taking a roundabout route to get here.

I see my own explorations in photography as an attempt to get at Hockney's little missing bit. If the book has more specifics that help to pin it down it'll be worth a read.

An exhibition of Hockney's landscapes is coming up at the RA early next year. There's a lot of fluff about his use of iphones and ipads, but there is also some real meat in his landscape paintings, and he has an approach to re-interpreting the same well-loved places over the long term that I find very attractive - in any medium. His remarks on seeing are always worth hearing.

[Drew Wiley]

I always seen him as an "idea" guy who got attention for intellectual novelty rather than any ability to translate this into solid photographs, sorta a flat tire in my opinion.
But once you get your foot in the door as a painter, that's one of the perks.

[David Karp]

I am wondering why the photograph "right" in the sense that it looks like the world.

Does a bronze bust look like the world?

[Brian C. Miller]

Struan, please do let us know if the book is good. I liked the interview quite a bit. I think Hockney made quite a few good points. "My argument is that there is a pictorial crisis in a way, but it’s in photography and film. That’s the twist. It’s not about painting."

He sees photography as having been a blip in time, and digital photography as being more akin to drawing and painting than chemical-optical photography.

[cyrus]

The interview has a rather limited understanding of photography as something that is restricted to realism and naturalism and "claiming veracity" - the idea that the intention of a photograph is to depict "reality" but that it fails to do so according to Hockney because it supposedly fails to include the "psychological" aspects. His idea that the death of Kodak means the end of photography shows this rather restricted view of what photography is too. That view is quite a false and limited understanding of the breadth of photography. Some forms of photography set out to depict reality, others not (in fact a good argument exists that even "realist" photographers are actually manufacturing reality) Photojournalists, landscape photographers, documentary photographers, perhaps street photographers and snapshot takers may do so, but plenty strive to get away from it and do so quite well. I don't see what a photograph supposedly cannot show "psychological aspects" as well as painting - after all, whether we're talking about photographs or painting, it is also just a medium spread on a substrate - ink on paper, oil paint on canvas or emulsion on paper. Photography is "painting with light" not just "documenting with light". Like the paintings of the Pharoahs that Hockney mentions, photographs can and do reflect the thinking of the artists and do not merely attempt to reproduce "reality" nor do they "claim veracity"

[Jay DeFehr]

Interesting interview. I think Hockney's thoughts on photography, and the acts of seeing and depicting, are among the clearest I've read. I tend to agree that photography of the 20th century variety is dead as an art form, but I'm more optimistic about its future than Hockney seems to be. Photography is a powerful medium, and I think there will always be artist who use it in new and interesting ways.

[Greg Miller]

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I’ve always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.


For landscape photographers, that "little bit" is what separates the wheat form the chaff. I think his assumption, that photography is nearly right, is wrong, and he knows it. He get's part of the way there in his next statement "I always knew that you couldn’t draw from them very well, because you couldn’t see and feel volume in the way you can in life" (duh, its a 2 dimensional medium so the photographer has to use skill to render the volume in the photo) and later with the "camera sees geometrically. We don’t. "

There are so many reasons why photography isn't nearly right starting with 2d vs. 3d., dynamic range of the medium, focal length, field of view, depth of field,...

It takes a fair amount of skill to get to nearly right. Then a lot more skill to get to right (not that photos are ever right, just the appearance of being right).

[Helen Bach]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention Struan. While reading the excerpt in the Telegraph I couldn't help thinking about Raymond Moore (http://www.weepingash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48:rmintro&catid=36:raymo&Itemid=6), and the conversations we had. I had the impression that photography had provided something that was missing in painting for Ray. That layer of plain reality that allowed things to be quietly odd.

Best,
Helen

[Kirk Gittings]

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I’ve always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
It is in that gap between nearly right and the perfect document where the "art" is.

[Robert Hughes]

Oops, misread the thread title: "LF Forum on Hockney's failings".

[Struan Gray]

Hockney is a big boy, and hardly needs my approval. Similarly, I don't have to bow down before him, or take his word as gospel. I have always admired the skill of his drawing, and the sense of gesture he works into even his flattest and most static paintings. From what he has said in various interviews he has a way of working and thinking which is very photographic, or, at least, very similar to the sorts of photographic projects that I find most engaging. I can live with a little friction.

I agree with those who say the little missing bit is what makes the difference between a competent photograph and a good or great one. Hockney is being dogmatic (I doubt he's ignorant) when he seems to deny that any photograph is complete.

My own attempts to capture that little bit have rubbed home how much the tools of straight photography are different from the tools of painting. With digital processing the rules have changed dramatically, but I'm not sure that copying abstractions from the history of painting is the way to go - it certainly doesn't attract me.

One issue Hockney doesn't address in the interview is the differing expectations viewers bring to different media. Cartier Bresson's most famous works would be unbearably cute as paintings. They work superbly as acts of observation, but would be less convincing if assumed to be acts of pure imagination. The difference is drawn from photography's perennial - and seemingly impossible to eradicate - connection to the real, to the idea that something actually existed in front of the camera, even if staged. I suspect it is the erosion of that expectation among the general public that Hockney is referring to in his use of the word 'crisis'.

I don't think there is any crisis. Credibility has been an issue for written descriptions of the world since day one, and there are very well established ways of dealing with it - or playing with it for artistic purposes. My own photography explicitly seeks out the 'quietly odd', or fey, aspects of the world, the things you usually don't see because you are not consciously looking for them. I rely heavily on the idea that what is in my photographs is, or was, truly there; but I also rely heavily on the idea that the world observed closely turns out to be stranger and more wonderful than anything my powers of invention or imagination could dream up, and that aspect of photography is one that Hockney seems not to have grasped.

I'm a fan of Terry Pratchett's advice in his Tiffany Aching stories: 'Open your eyes, and then open them again'.

[Struan Gray]

A quick update: I now have the book, and have found time to read it. It is worth the price of admission.

It is not the sort of book you should read for explicit information about photography. Hockney's views are unremittingly critical, and in a snide, mean-spirited way at that. His privilege.

What is worth reading are his thoughts on how to respond to the world around you as an artist, particularly when that world is not the sublime or picturesque norm that immediately springs to mind when most people think of the word 'landscape'. Hockney works in a way that will be familiar to many photographers quietly stomping their own local patch, and the paintings have many similarities of feel and concept with photographic projects from many of my favourite photographers. That includes a desire to ignore the ugly realities of asymmetry and fly-tipping - a blinkered view I personally find verging on immature - but again, neither Hockney nor those photographers need my approval.

The paintings are being exhibited at the Royal Academy in London for another couple of weeks. Were I in the UK I would make the effort to go and see them.

At the risk of lecturing on the noble art of egg-sucking, anyone who likes the paintings but finds the attitude tiresome might like to investigate the work of the British New Romantic painters and print makers. I suspect Hockney owes them as large a debt as he does the despised art of photography. Paul Nash's "Wood on the downs (http://www.aagm.co.uk/thecollections/objects/object/Wood-on-the-Downs?l)" has a similar feel without the bombast.

[SergeiR]

Missed it somehow.

First of all - For many reasons in which i shall embark here, i dont see smug comments from him as anything special, b/c "greatest living" - i do hope he is not. Not a personal attack. Just summary of thoughts after looking at his body of work.

Secondly - it is very very VERY limited view that he has. I dont know why, either actual and honest "not have any idea" (as in - never ever seeing works of early pictoralist's movement, and experiments with projection controls and all sorts of things) or just desire to pose as "greatest". It is almost like he feels limited and threatened like many others by photography as medium. Just like it was since first photograph was displayed. Photography is not here to replace art of drawing/painting. They are very different and very similar in many great ways. Both are - expression forms, no more, no less. Its like saying "drawing with oil will be not a drawing, only charcoal is a way to go". Or that every drawing should have followed principles of human anatomy to the letter or disregard it. I.e. Its rubbish.

[Brian C. Miller]

Secondly - it is very very VERY limited view that he has. I dont know why, either actual and honest "not have any idea" (as in - never ever seeing works of early pictoralist's movement, and experiments with projection controls and all sorts of things) or just desire to pose as "greatest". It is almost like he feels limited and threatened like many others by photography as medium. Just like it was since first photograph was displayed. Photography is not here to replace art of drawing/painting. They are very different and very similar in many great ways. Both are - expression forms, no more, no less. Its like saying "drawing with oil will be not a drawing, only charcoal is a way to go". Or that every drawing should have followed principles of human anatomy to the letter or disregard it. I.e. Its rubbish.

From watching some interviews with him, it seems that he feels too constrained by photography. He wants to express something as he feels it, not as how it is absolutely seen. For him, Photoshop and digital photography allows photography to not be photography, but to become drawing and painting once again. He says that he can't draw or paint from a photograph, as he needs to experience the "volume" of a place. When he creates a collage, he calls that drawing, not an arrangement of photographs.

[Kirk Gittings]

He is really talking about HIS failings in working with the medium. A medium has limitations and in and of itself it can neither fail nor succeed.

[anglophone1]

Was in London last week, went for second time to the Hockney show at RA ( first in january)
I'd say its a must if you are in London, and although not photography Hockney is definitely a (the?) major living artist of the photo/ digital age.
Much of the latest work drawn on an IPad and then made wall size.
My daughter who is head of art at a major UK school was with me , she believes he is the Monet of our time, but as ever many won't see this until he's gone........

[Kirk Gittings]

I'm actually a fan. I am just criticizing his rhetoric about the medium.

[SergeiR]

From watching some interviews with him, it seems that he feels too constrained by photography. He wants to express something as he feels it, not as how it is absolutely seen. For him, Photoshop and digital photography allows photography to not be photography, but to become drawing and painting once again. He says that he can't draw or paint from a photograph, as he needs to experience the "volume" of a place. When he creates a collage, he calls that drawing, not an arrangement of photographs.

Well if it limits his abiity - thats fine with me. In interview, however, it seems a bit wider generalization :) And also , again, photoshop is not only way to gain control over projection and how things are done :)

[SergeiR]

Was in London last week, went for second time to the Hockney show at RA ( first in january)
I'd say its a must if you are in London, and although not photography Hockney is definitely a (the?) major living artist of the photo/ digital age.
Much of the latest work drawn on an IPad and then made wall size.
My daughter who is head of art at a major UK school was with me , she believes he is the Monet of our time, but as ever many won't see this until he's gone........

Be as it may. I doesnt strike me as anything like that, but its out of scope for the forum anyway. I am not art buyer by all means. But i did went to art school since i was wyn, so may be i got spoiled.

[Drew Wiley]

Sometimes folks like Hockney get a bully pulpit just because they are successful painters;
but I'm of the impression he never really understood photography as an independent media. But I've never been entusiastic about highbrow British foppery anyway.

[Darin Boville]

Hockney has a warm place in me heart after his recent commentary on the Hirst dot paintings.

--Darin

[Drew Wiley]

I think Hirst is interesting the way he simplifies the rules of the game, and then is absolutely brilliant the way he modulates subtle variations in hue and tonality in the dot
matrix. There was a recent interview with him where he made no attempt to hide the fact
that he was playing a Warhol redux, that is, manufactured fame. That whole mindset makes me sick. But it has taken him to the bank. But what do I know. I'm admittedly a
hillbilly who hates opera, ballet, and champagne. I'd rather be out thrashing thru the weeds with my Ries.

[Maris Rusis]

David Hockney's disappointment with photography comes, I think, from not really understanding the fundamental challenge of the medium. By photography I mean making pictures out of light-sensitive materials. Put simply photographs do not match the pictures our brain presents to our consciousness when we look at things. This has been a major source of disappointment from the very beginning and it dismays Hockney even now.

What's going on? Remember, the mind blends multiple images acquired during rapid eye movements called saccades. This is "image stitching" par excellence.
Eye based images containing deep shadow detail are blended in the brain with images of what is in the highlights. This is HDR par excellence.
Finally the picture in our mind's eye is also composited from what we saw in the past, what we "know" is there, and what we expect to see. This is "image merging" par excellence. Optical illusions are really mind illusions.

Painting, drawing, and modern digital picture-making replicates to a remarkable extent what happens automatically and involuntarily in our brains when we see the world. No one by effort of will can turn off this mental stitching, merging, and HDR-ing. It is no surprise that paintings, drawings, and digipix are so comforting, familiar, and popular. They flatter our perception of the world by merely reflecting back to us what we think we see.

To close here is a thought bomb: since we cannot, by effort of will, turn off the image processing that runs constantly in our minds the only way to see a sample of the world as it really is to make a photograph of it! Someone whose pictorial values emanate from painting and drawing, David Hockney perhaps, will always be disappointed when they look for those values in a photograph.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, every time I've seen Hockney's own photographs I was disappointed
in them. I'm even more disappointed in the current trend to paint with
Fauxtoshop. Seems like the Final Solution to actual objective photography.
I'd agree that sometimes a greater sense of reality can actually be conveyed (or implied) in a painting, given sufficient skill. So in that sense
I envy the really acute painters of various eras. But in many ways photog
presents are different set of challenges, with rewards of its own, which I
would rather take head on rather than dodge. Specifically, it demands
a somewhat different form of discovery. The hunt is often the greater reward than the kill, which doesn't come that often."Great" photographers are often defined by a handful of of significant shots over a lifetime.

[sepstein17]

Although photography freezes a moment in time, the reality of what we see is based on Maris's assertion that our expectations shape our vision. But what we think we see does not always translate into what we produce. Ever print a neg (w/o printing a contact sheet or contact print first) and are surprised with the content of the enlargement? I have and that's the mind saying hello -- "image processing" will never be an exact science. The mind is a powerful mechanism that still fills one with wonder -- painter and photographer alike.

[Michael Alpert]

Since the invention of electronic music, it has become impossible to do any creative work with acoustical instruments. Those old instruments go part of the way toward making layered music, but the little piece that's missing means everything. Yes, those rudimentary fiddles and pianos and what-nots are evidence of dull minds and nothing more. And now that we have iPads, writing poems with pencils has become a complete waste of time. Only people who are stuck in the ancient twentieth century would ever-ever write poems with pencils. And painting with paint . . . well, we who know what's what can only smile at all the old idiots in merry old England and elsewhere who still paint paintings and draw drawings.

[Michael Alpert]

It occurs to me that the ridiculous, immodest statement that I wrote late last night might actually be taken seriously. It was a joke, though what I wrote seems quite close to some of the pronouncements made by Sir David in his interview and some of the statements about traditional photography posted on this forum. Confusion about ends and means can become a source of myopia from which there is no easy exit. Yes, you can write poems with pencils, and you can make relevant contemporary art with cameras and film. To think otherwise would be truly idiotic.