Hockney valued painting because of the medium’s relationship to time. According to him, an image contained the amount of time that went into making it, so that when someone looked at one of his paintings, they began to inhabit the physical, bodily time of its being painted. It’s no surprise, then, that Hockney initially disdained photography. Although he sometimes used it in studies for paintings, he found a snapshot’s relationship to time unrealistic: “Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second,” he said. “But
...more
