DAVID HOCKNEY | Photographs

96 plates of photographs!  The allure of David Hockney's world captured through the lens.  

A 15 page essay by Hockney begins with a selfie from 1962.  Delve into the his musings on perception and beauty, as he eloquently reflects on the transformative power of looking.

Boards and pages are pristine. Dust jacket front has light rubbing and wear. Dust jacket back has moderate scratching. Fine book in good ++ jacket. Very good ++ overall.

"David Hockney photographs" marks the first publication of photographs by one of the world's foremost visual artists. Selected from more than 20,000 images, these pictures record the artist's intense involvement with photography over the past twenty years. From his first use of photography as a primitive device for recording his work and environment, to the highly sophisticated Cubist technique of his recent work, David Hockney photographs reveals an astonishing range of images and ideas, in pictures as playful as they are sublime.

David Hockney's paintings, prints and drawings are known internationally.Since he first came to public attention in the early 1960's his work has been acclaimed for its unique ability to restate traditional concerns of painting - landscape portraiture. still life-for the thoroughly contemporary mind and eye. Those same qualities that appear in Hockneys paintings and graphic work - rhapsodic color, serene light. acute attentiveness and a charming eccentricity of theme and realization - appear in his photographs.

For Hockney the camera is both sketchbook and diary, recording his travels across the globe, those friends that make up his world, and the intricate network of dwellings, objects and images that define his life Hockney s photographs (many of which have been used as a basis for his paintings) are as well a documentation of the artist's ideas about perception. They are about a way of looking:

"The beauty of anything is exactly as the poet describes: it's in the process oflooking rather than in the thing itself. Constable said, "I never saw an ugly thing." I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful." (David Hockney, from the Introduction)
As well as providing a visual album of the artist's world in 80 color plates and 6 black and white illustrations, David Hockney photographs includes a fascinating history by the artist of the development of his pictures, with insightful comments regarding the dialogue between photographs and paintings and the essential nature of the photographic image."

"David Hockney photographs, the first book on the subject, lays to rest at least two misconceptions- Hockney is much more than the 'holiday snapper' he sometimes claims to be-and the role of the photographs in relation to his paintings, drawings and prints, is much too subtle and complex to encapsulate glibly. What is apparent, and handsomely so, is the deep and consistent feeling for people, places and situations. It is David Hockney's vision of the world, bright and intimate, that unifies whatever the idiom." - Henry Geldzahler
-from the dust jacket flap

8.5 x 12 inches