In a BBC2 interview with Andrew Marr on 27 February (A Culture Show Special: The Art of Seeing), walking through David Hockney’s current Royal Academy exhibition in London, the artist talks about how we forget to see things, to look at things.
A photograph, he says, is flat. When you enlarge it, it remains flat.
So instead of enlarging one picture, he has travelled (with assistants) around the British countryside with nine high-definition cameras mounted in a frame on the bonnet of a jeep. Each camera has been set at a slightly different angle, exposure or time, all filming simultaneously.
In the exhibition, nine or even eighteen screens are then framed together as one large, homogenous ‘picture’, quite different from a montage of stills, in which the small changes in the moving images bring a ‘simple’ scenery alive.
Apart from showing us the beauty of a countryside we tend to take for granted, it is a fascinating transposition of what our eyes naturally do as we move from one angle of view to another while driving or walking.
‘Look harder. It’s still there… and it’s very beautiful, it has seasons, it has change… The weather’s bad… for who?’
Still image from May 12th 2011 Rudston to Kilham Road 5 PM.
Copyright © David Hockney
I wish I had found a moving image…