Anne And David, Central Park, N.Y. Dec

This signed photographic print, entitled Anne And David, Central Park, N.Y. Dec, belongs to a limited edition of 10 and is a key example of British artist David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photo collages. The artist’s early experimentations with photography were birthed by the Polaroid camera he first discovered upon his move to the United States in 1964. Early photographic compositions involved taking a number of photographs of a given subject and arranging them in a grid-like pattern. Creating a patchwork of images, the famous white border of the Polaroid photo would disrupt the forms these photos depicted. In these later works, however, Hockney moved away from the Polaroid and towards other photographic media, such as the 110, small-format camera, overlapping the edges of his photos so as to engender fresh perspectives of his subjects. Hockney named these pieces, and the methodology they make use of, ‘joiners’. Achieving what Hockney dubbed ‘an illusion of space we have not seen before’, this photographic methodology allowed him to make portraits that were ‘more and more complex’, and which distorted our perception of the camera as a time-based format. In this photograph print, we see Hockney’s friends sitting at a bench in New York’s Central Park; the scene appears to bend ahead of us, mimicking the eye’s perspective in the process.