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Course: The J. Paul Getty Museum > Unit 2
Lesson 3: Photographers- P.H. Emerson
- P.H. Emerson's naturalistic photography
- John Humble's photographs of Los Angeles
- Camilo Vergara documents the changing urban landscape
- David Hockney's "Pearblossom Hwy"
- Eileen Cowin on her series "I See What You're Saying"
- Carrie Mae Weems on her series "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried"
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David Hockney's "Pearblossom Hwy"
The artist David Hockney called his photo collages, “drawing with a camera.” Here he discusses perspective and other issues in Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #2. Created by Getty Museum.
Want to join the conversation?
- what was the intention of it when making the work?(2 votes)
- What do you think, is it a photo, a painting, or something else?(1 vote)
- If I was being general, I would say it is a photo collage, but from my artistic point of view, (and I am an artist of many forms, including a photographer) it is so much more than that, it is more than even what the video suggests. What do you think?(2 votes)
Video transcript
- Originally it was meant
to illustrate a story for Vanity Fair about Humbert Humbert looking for Lolita, and it was about driving 'round the Southwest and kind of, what he called
"the monotony of the road". I'd agreed to do it,
and we came looking for a location as it were,
to do a road like this. We needed a side road because I knew how complex it would be to do it. And we eventually found
this, and I realized the signs were good, the highway sign. That there were one,
two, three, four signs quite close to each other actually then. I think it was 10 days
shooting the pictures. There's about 800 i think on it. In the end the whole scheme,
I conceived it much too big. I'd just gone off on another area really, and I didn't mind when they
said they wouldn't use it. I thought, "Well, I've got
something quite terrific "out of it, so I don't mind". Although it looks as though
it is a central viewpoint, the perspective does look traditional, not one photograph is taken
from that central viewpoint. They're all taken from all over. And, you're looking down on the road, you're looking up, you're
looking every direction. I think I probably began
with the stop sign, meaning I'm up a ladder and I'm photographing very close to it. Every photograph here is
taken close to something, which is why you the
viewer feel involved in it and feel close to it, that's what does it. You can see the cracks in the enamel. You are actually, literally
close to everything. You're moving around in it. But, I mean, I was aware that
cameras do push you away. I was trying to pull you in. My photographic friend
said it was a painting and I said it was photography. In a sense, one did paint the sky, because you could decide on blues. I would photograph the actual sky, but of course in printing it
can be done lighter, darker, so in a way I was making a choice of blue, and in a way that's like a painter, not like a photographer. I think the sky is made up of
perhaps 200 separate pieces. In that sense I'll admit, I made choices. As you will now notice
here, I moved the trees from up there, I could move things around. When I first did collages I called it "drawing with a camera", I felt
that's what you were doing. Like in drawing, you make choices. We don't all see the same things. We don't all hear the same things either. That's what artists tell us, or that's what I keep trying to do anyway.