Hockney’s photo-collage grids break photography’s single-instant frame

Evidence

In 1982, a curator from the Centre Pompidou museum came to Hockney’s LA house to document some of his paintings with a Polaroid camera and happened to leave behind some blank Polaroid film. Hockney’s curiosity got the better of him, and he started walking through his house taking photos in every direction. Developing a technique he would use for years afterward, he joined the photos into a grid whose overall effect is like that of a disjointed fish-eye lens—photos pointing forward are in the center, photos pointing to the left are on the left, etc. Lawrence Weschler contrasts these early pieces with Eadweard Muybridge’s grids of photographic motion studies, in which the grid functions as a sequence, like a comic strip. Hockney’s grids contain no such sequence. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 354

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast with Muybridge’s sequential grids could surface how attention-resisting media impose linear narrative, tying to the critique of how attention is monetized. — connects to: Hockney deliberately dismantled photography’s static instant-framing — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 355; Hockney’s photo joiners constitute drawing rather than photography — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 358; Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 408
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Hockney deliberately dismantled photography’s static instant-framing — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 355; Hockney’s photo joiners constitute drawing rather than photography — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 358; Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 408

Broader Connections

• Hockney deliberately dismantled photography’s static instant-framing #expands (0.98) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 355
• Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another #complicates (0.71) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 408