One Landscape, Many Views.

David Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, in 1937. He attended Bradford College of Art and later the Royal College of Art in London. There he began to work in the Pop Art style, which drew its imagery from advertisements, television, movies, comics, and packaging. Hockney achieved international renown for his prints and drawings, and by his mid-twenties was among Britain's leading artists.

In 1964 Hockney moved to Los Angeles, and by the decade's close he was considered the quintessential southern California painter. His art is most strongly associated with images of swimming pools, which he has represented in prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Hockney has also painted intimate portraits, domestic still lifes, and landscapes. Since the 1970s he has created a number of acclaimed stage designs. In recent years, he has extended his reputation as a versatile, inventive artist by using unconventional technologies such as photocopiers, fax machines, and video cameras to create art.

The Context

Hockney had used photographs as the starting point for many of his paintings, but a new approach to photography captured his interest in 1981: "I started to play with the Polaroid camera and began making collages. This intrigued me and I became obsessed with it." Eventually Hockney stopped creating his collages with Polaroid prints, which had white borders, and turned to using borderless 35 mm pictures that he had printed at ordinary commercial processors rather than professional labs.

Hockney was not the first to assemble photographs into a collage. Several European and American artists experimented with various approaches to photographic collage before Hockney. Unlike these artists, however, Hockney combined multiple views of a single scene in order to explore the way people shift their gaze in many directions as they observe something.

The Work

Pearblossom Hwy. is the culmination of Hockney's experimentation with photocollage. Its size, roughly ten feet wide and six feet high, makes it of a scale traditionally associated with paintings, not photographs. The picture shows a springtime landscape near the desert communities of Palmdale and Pearblossom. The photograph has Hockney's characteristic palette, rich in blues, greens, yellows, and sandy tones.

It is the second and larger version of a similar photocollage of this scene by Hockney and consists of some 750 photographs depicting the vast desert landscape and the trash discarded there. The crushed beer can, empty Bud Lite box, and can of Castrol GTX motor oil contrast with the grandeur of the distant snowcapped San Gabriel mountains and the Joshua trees.

Hockney returned to this spot several times over the course of nine days, recording hundreds of details and standing on a ladder to photograph the various street signs head-on. In Hockney's words, this image is "far and away the most complex and most successful of the photocollages I have done."

For the Viewer

Pearblossom Hwy. is an example of Hockney's playful investigation of perspective. Intrigued by how Cubist painters incorporated multiple viewpoints of a single subject, here he has taken their approach and applied it to the medium of photography. In fact, Hockney has even described Pearblossom Hwy. as "a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective." (A picture created in one-point perspective has a fixed central viewpoint, and objects in the picture appear to recede in space as they approach a single point on the horizon.)

Hockney suggests that our actual experience of looking is better expressed by a collage of photographs than by a single image: "If you put six pictures together, you look at them six times. This is more what it's like to look at [something]."

The multiplicity of vantage points creates an immediacy and enhances the sense of being right in the middle of whatever is depicted: "We do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that's how we feel."

Hockney also tried to integrate a sense of the time that passes as we examine a scene. Each individual photograph in Pearblossom Hwy. records one of the hundreds of moments of observation that, taken together, convey Hockney's experience of studying this landscape over a period of several days.

Questions about Meaning

1 Why do you think Hockney combined hundreds of photos to create a picture of the desert instead of just taking a single snapshot?

Taking a single snapshot would have made him miss the chance to rearrange some of the elements in the scene and incorporate many different viewpoints. In the artist's opinion, it also would have made the work much less interesting.

2 How can you tell that Hockney took pictures at different times of the day during the days he photographed this scene?

There is a shadow cast from the Stop Ahead sign, but the other signs have no such shadows.

3 Why do the signs look larger than they would in an ordinary photograph of this scene?

Hockney stood on a ladder to photograph them close-up and head-on.

4 Can you think of anything that Hockney didn't take a picture of while photographing this stretch of highway?

Himself and his two companions, his car, the ladder he stood on to take some of the pictures, large amounts of space between the various signs along the road, the edges of the road, and the power poles on the left side of the road.

Key Concepts/Themes

1 Just as Cubist painters incorporated multiple viewpoints on a single subject in their paintings, Hockney took photographs from a variety of vantage points to create Pearblossom Hwy.

2 The fact that there are so many individual photographs in Pearblossom Hwy. emphasizes the astonishing number of details that make up the desert highway setting. Looking at them closely conveys a sense of the time that passes as we observe all the details of a scene.

3 Hockney feels that a single photograph often fails to hold the viewer's attention, but he considers a collage of photographs to be interesting because it provides so many things to look at.

Resources/References

Hockney, David. That's the Way I See It. Ed. Nikos Stangos. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.

Joyce, Paul. Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988.

Livingstone, Marco. David Hockney. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.

Weschler, Lawrence. Cameraworks: David Hockney. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Activities

Elementary: Find Pearblossom Highway on a map, near Palmdale, California. Have students name everything they see in the picture and create a list on the board. Discuss the distinctive terrain and climate of deserts. Ask students what features in this picture tell you that it is set in the desert. Compare the desert with the terrain and climate in your own region.

Junior High A) Write a paragraph on how each of the following characters might react to the scene depicted in Hockney's collage: a highway maintenance worker, an artist, a lizard, an environmentalist. B) Have students find other works of art that depict the desert landscape and compare them to Hockney's photocollage.

High School A) Have students, individually or in small groups, create their own photocollages of a scene of their choice. Ask them also to take a single photograph of the same scene. Have students present their pictures and compare the two images of each setting. B) Students can research other Hockney photocollages, such as Luncheon at the British Embassy and Fredda Bringing Ann and Me a Cup of Tea.