Drawn to the Lens

When Cologne’s Ludwig Museum approached David Hockney in the mid-’90s about doing a major retrospective of his photography, Hockney immediately agreed. “I assumed it wouldn’t take much of my time,” he says.

He’d obviously forgotten how many photographs there were to choose from. Usually thought of more as a painter, or even a set designer, the British-born L.A. emigre has been taking pictures seriously since the ‘60s. Shooting people and places, still lifes and landscapes, usually in ways they’d never been shot before, he has continually challenged how the camera sees and, in fact, what the camera is.

“David Hockney Retrospective: Photoworks” opens Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art with more than 200 works spanning three decades. Featuring many photos never seen by the public, the exhibition opened in Germany in December 1997, has been touring Europe and makes its final stop at MOCA, its only U.S. venue.

There are the Polaroids of the early ‘80s, the still video portraits of the early ‘90s, tributes to Cubism and to California sunshine. In addition to his more traditional photos of swimming pools in Los Angeles and chairs in Phoenix, there are huge multi-image views of the Grand Canyon as well as such intricate photocollages as his Pearblossom Highway.

Just back from Europe, where he was working with the BBC on a film documenting his latest forays into art history, Hockney walked theMOCA galleries in an aqua shirt and gray pants held up with suspenders, his gray-blond hair covered by a beret. His conversation, like his photography, is wide-ranging, sweeping in everything from 15th century painters to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hockney’s much-anticipated book “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters,” exploring his research and theories on early artistic uses of optical devices, will be published this fall. The book will be followed by the related BBC film and, in early December, a two-day conference at NYU’s Institute for the Humanities led by its director, writer Lawrence Weschler. “The book couldn’t have happened without the photography,” Hockney says. “I wouldn’t have been able to see what I was seeing.”

Question: You’ve said that your work in photography tends to come in cycles. What might prompt such a cycle?

Answer: The Polaroids started oddly enough [in the early ‘80s] when I’d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion. I started playing with the Polaroid camera, and I didn’t give it up for six months. People say, “You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.” But nothing is a sideline for me.

Photography also led me to explore a lot of other things. Photography leads you to explore things.

Q: What is it leading you to explore now?

A: On May 25, at 7 in the morning, with the BBC, we got them to open the doors of the Duomo in Florence, and we stood where [renowned Renaissance architect] Brunelleschi was supposed to have stood. We put up a panel the probable size of what he used for the very first perspective picture, and then with a makeup mirror I bought in Kensington High Street, we projected the Baptistry onto the panel. We were really demonstrating how he made his perspective picture, but I’m also saying he used an optical projection. That was about 1412, and we think no one had done this in Florence for 590 years.

Q: You mean, in a way, he used a camera?

A: The camera is really just a piece of glass actually, just a lens. We found you can make a camera any way you want. A camera is really just either a tiny pinhole, a hole with a lens, or a hole with a mirror--and a dark place. It dawned on me that Brunelleschi was in the dark cathedral, looking out into the light, so the cathedral was a camera. “Camera” just means “room” in Italian. “Camera obscura” just means “dark room.”

I work on hunches sometimes, and my instincts told me there was something there. It turned out that the optical picture goes back a long way.

Q: Aside from cameras, you’ve also been rethinking photography recently, given the advent of computers and such things as Adobe Photoshop.

A: The invention of photography was the invention of chemicals to fix an image already seen. That lasted for 160 years. It’s now just come to an end, and [that is] making the way we look at things very different.

When the computer comes in, the photograph begins to lose veracity. Before that, if you saw something in a photograph, you assumed, quite rightly most of the time, that at one particular point in time and space these objects looked approximately like this or were in this position. Now that’s not necessarily the case. You can draw photographs in a way. The photograph has moved toward drawing and painting.

I met Cartier-Bresson in 1975 in Paris. The day before I met him--I didn’t know this--but I was watching him. I saw this man walking down the street, photographing, and I could tell he knew what he was doing. I didn’t know who it was, but I followed him for a few streets, just watching what he did. Then, the next day, I was introduced to him [at] a show of my drawings. Of course I wanted to talk about photography, but he told me he’d just given up photography and wanted to talk about drawing.

He was the master of that era, really. He began with the rise of the small 35-millimeter camera that didn’t need a tripod, and faster film so you could photograph practically anywhere, and although he’s still alive, he ended when, in a sense, technology was changing the form.

Q: Technology has certainly changed the form of your work. Consider, for instance, that huge wall in the exhibition of photographs of the Grand Canyon.

A: I took those photographs in 1982, and we realized we could print them big now, even print them in my studio on a color copying machine. Which we did. When I took those photographs in ‘82, if I’d have wanted them printed as big as that, it would have cost $500 minimum just to print one of them in color. I printed those on a color copier, and it probably cost $50 or $60 to do them all, and we could do it ourselves.

Q: Then there is the entire room of still video composite portraits you were doing around 1990. Watching you then, I remember thinking how fast and simple the process seemed: You just took the photos, pulled a floppy disk out of the camera, looked at the images on your video monitor and printed them up on the color laser printer.

A: Yes, no one was invited to come and pose. People would just happen to be [at the studio] and I always stood them in the same place, always took five pictures, moving down their bodies, and printed them off immediately. The only equipment we need is a printing machine and color toners.

Q: If you were to summarize, what do you think about photography right now as a medium?

A: Well, it’s certainly in a big transition. Printing is part of it. The computer. Even my sister at home in East Yorkshire has a digital camera. She goes out, takes the picture, puts it on her computer and can move the dog over here or over there. She doesn’t think twice about it, really.

The actual making of images has not been seriously discussed in quite a while. But it will be. It has to be. Photography really comes out of painting. It’s a child of painting, and it’s going back to it now. It’s going back to its mother.

“David Hockney Retrospective: Photoworks,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213)621-2766, through Oct. 21. Closed Mondays.