Hockney’s photo joiners constitute drawing rather than photography

Evidence

Though he was using a camera, Hockney did not consider his cubist representations of people and moments to be photographs. Instead he considered what he was doing to be closer to drawing; indeed, he compared his discovery to only using pencils to draw dots and then finding out that you can draw lines. These “lines” evoked movements of the eye as it takes in a scene, and they’re especially evident once Hockney forewent the grid altogether. In The Scrabble Game, Jan. 1, 1983, the photos sprawl out unpredictably from the Scrabble board, overlapping in a way that inadvertently evokes the photo-merging capabilities of Photoshop as much as it does the organic growth of a Scrabble game. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 358