Name: ______
Mr. Vedder Digital Design
Creating a Digital “Joiner”
In the style of David Hockney
For this assignment, the objective will be to digitally merge a series of photos in the style of David Hockney. The digital “joiner” composition will have at least 12 photos of similar exposure, which can be matched using the “levels” adjustment tool. Students will photograph their own dynamic composition, either in a cubist, fisheye, linear, or a non-linear format. Compositions of everyday objects create interesting digital “joiners”, so try different objects and scenes. The requirements are as follows:
Requirements:
- Photographs – At least 12 different photos, cubist, fisheye, linear or non-linear. Most compositions use more than 12 photographs.
- Joiner Size– Depends on the file size of your camera. Most photos are either 72, 180 or 300 DPI, and the canvas needs to match the DPI, and allow enough room for the digital “joiner”.
David Hockney(1937- ). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, and designer. After a brilliant prize-winning career as a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney had achieved international success by the time he was in his mid-20s, and has since consolidated his position as by far the best-known British artist of his generation.
His early paintings, often almost jokey in mood, gained him a reputation of leading Pop artist, although he himself rejected the label.
Hockney also worked with photography, or more precisely - photomontage. Using varying numbers (~5-150) of small Polaroid snaps or photo lab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photos are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work which has an affinity with cubism, affinity which was some of Hockney's major aims - discussing the way human vision works.
These photomontage works appeared mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.
Hockney's creation of the joiners were never planned, he just sort of discovered them. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He didn't like them because the photographs were distorted in ways that a person never sees. It was not consistent with human vision.