Self Project - Dereliction and Decay

Examples of "Joiners"

In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photocollages, which he called "joiners," first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially-processed color prints. Using Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image.An early photomontage was of his mother. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney's major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some pieces are landscapes, such as Pearblossom Highway #2, others portraits, such as Kasmin 1982,and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.

Between 1970 and 1986, he created photomontages, calling them joiners. He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject moved while being photographed, so that the pieces show the movements of the subject from the camera's perspective. In later works, Hockney changed the technique, moving the camera around the subject.

Creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses. He did not like these photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. On looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the room. He began to work more with photography after this discovery and stopped painting for a while to exclusively pursue this new technique. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach, however, he returned to painting.

My Favourite Quotes on Photography

“Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything.” -Leonard Missone

"Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment." – Elliott Erwitt

"You don’t take a photograph, you make it." -Ansel Adams

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." -Diane Arbus

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” - Susan Sontag


“There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!” - Joe McNally

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” - Scott Lorenzo

Understanding Joshua(2001) - Charlie White

Charlie White photographs vulnerability.

Using a humanoid puppet he calls "complete fragility manifest in a body," White presents human frailty through a fictional character, much as a novelist might.
His puppet, called Joshua, helps him to explore the themes of male self-image and self-loathing. White places Joshua in a series of vulnerable situations -- at a cocktail party or a lover's house --and photographs the scene.
The manner in which these photographs are set portrays hesitation to break through many of the social boundaries set today. I especially love how Joshua provides a window into the aspects of psychology such as body dis-morphia which links to sexual appeal and so the content featured in many of these shots.
http://www.charliewhite.info/work/