Space-Time Joiner Photographs

David Hockney has published many spatial “joiner” photographs, an overall image built out of many smaller photographs. Hockney’s spatial joiners provide multiple local perspectives that create a richer 3-D perspective in the overall image.

Here is Hockney’s Pearblossom Hwy. 11-18th April 1986, #2.

In his very beautiful and smart book, That’s the Way I See It, Hockney writes, “I started Pearblossom Hwy. when I was commissioned by Vanity Fair to illustrate a piece by my friend Gregor von Rezzori, retracing Humbert Humbert’s journey in search of Lolita. It was my last photo-collage and the most painterly. I spent nine days doing the photographs and two weeks assembling it. I see it as a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective.”

Joiners can be simultaneously temporal and spatial. Here’s a small experiment.

And shown here in a large screen JPEG.

Note the intensified 3-D quality resulting from Abby’s leap in the direction of the expanded space. The sculpture is Escaping Flatland #3; its stainless steel surface is borrowing (indeed directly appropriating) light from the sky.