Gregory Loading His Camera, Kyoto, Feb. 1983
Gregory Loading His Camera, Kyoto, Feb. 1983
Signed Print
David Hockney
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53 x 36cm, Photographic print
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Meaning & Analysis
Created in 1983, Gregory Loading His Camera, Kyoto is a photographic print by British artist, David Hockney. This photo collage depicts Hockney’s lifelong friend and lover, Gregory Evans, through a series of overlapping images pieced and glued together into a playful composition. Referred to by the artist as ‘joiners’, the 1980s photo collages are based on photographs taken by Hockney with a Pentax or Nikon camera.
Although at a first glance it may appear that the artist multiplied one and the same photograph, it is fragments of three different but similarly looking photographs, placed on top of one another, that endow the scene with a sense of energy and movement. Gregory’s head bent downwards is pictured three times, while a set of images at the centre of the collage presents his hands in a variety of positions. The idea behind the arrangement is to depict the simple task of loading a camera as an active process. If scanned quickly from right to the left, the pictures of Gregory’s hands create the illusion that the action progresses before the viewer’s eyes. Hockney commented in the context of joiners, “[they] brought me closer to the way we actually experience the activity of seeing, and it actually led me back to drawing and painting, with a whole new sense of the possibilities to be found there.”