Sur la photographie

David Hockney is an old master, without nostalgia. In his writings, the British visual artist often considers art in its least romantic guise: technique. The same is true of his exploration of the photographic medium, as demonstrated by these three texts dating from 1982 and 2012 and brought together by Galerie Lelong. Hockney brings his painterly eye to the ‘instant image’. If chemistry has ‘removed the human hand’, the cubist use of the Polaroid has given photography a dimension it did not have, that of the passing of time. See the cover of this book, illustrated with a detail from Nicholas Wilder studying Picasso in Los Angeles on 24 March 1982. Hockney doesn’t simply stick Polaroids together. He destructures the image, breaks it down, plays with scale and depth of field. The instant becomes the moment.