Dissection 16
An Observation of Layouts
Original Essay: Eye of a Dog (& Other Materials)
Of all the reasons why I prefer essays to the single image, the most important one is that it aligns with how I experience the visual world. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting perfectly still, or moving: I’ll record the surrounding space through glances. It’s always a composite, always an assemblage. This has been the foundation of everything I’ve done for the past…almost fifteen years now.
This week I came across David Hockney’s photographic collages, or rather the motivation behind them (I’d seen the work before). Apparently, Hockney initially disliked photography, an art form he saw as little more than a flat recording of reality. His opinion changed after experimenting with a Polaroid camera a friend had left behind at his house, snapping haphazard shots and laying them together on a grid:
From that first day, I was exhilarated… I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not at all once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world… There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful.
You don’t say.
I love Hockney’s experiments with grids and how they break up the notion of time. But I never knew of the impulse behind them, and how close this was to my own motivation. I’m not comparing myself to Hockney here btw (as if), I just found it interesting. A kind of, dare I say, validation?
I shot the essay Eye Of A Dog (& Other Materials) about two weeks before reading about this. But now when I look at it, I can’t help seeing the grid itself as a stronger visual statement than the individual images it contains. Even as square, fragmented versions of the originals. And it’s nothing new: I usually prefer the rhythm of multiple images on a page. This is where storyboarding makes sense to me, where the narrative is truly revealed. It’s the reason I spend so much time searching for a proper sequence, and always review the focal point of each picture on a grid block.
As soon as an image goes full-screen, however, the spell is broken.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s time to deconstruct and accept, once and for all, that my “real” work exists in multiples of 3. In visible intersections and interferences. Delineations are part of the whole.
On the technical side: someone mentioned the 60 mm f/2.4 lens in the comments, and yes, it really is the ugly stepchild in Fujifilm’s lens lineup. I never really enjoy using it—it’s loud and tends to miss focus way too often. But I’m also never disappointed by the images. Since I only use it as a macro lens, I keep it paired with the MCEX-11 extension tube these days, which is what I used here.
And with this, I pause the stream of consciousness. How do you feel about layouts?
