by Lawrence Weschler

Cristóbal recommended this when I was working on my image sampler project. I read and loved the chapters on Hockney's camera works and then at some point set it down. In the meantime I read Weschler's Robert Irwin book and have never really stopped thinking about it. I got a paper copy and went through the whole thing.

Hockney's photo collages

Ways of working

The first thing that struck me in the camera essays is how engaged Hockney is. Weschler is always visiting his house and to find him absorbed at his work table, full of new ideas of things he wants to try out. It made me think "I want a working life like that". Not necessarily on the same stuff, but with that same degree of interest. It definitely had an influence on my setting up my work table.

I thought the same thing through a lot of the Irwin book. How great is it that Irwin just goes off and reads phenomenology for a couple of years? Just because he thought it was important to his work and he trusted his own sense of what was important.

Representing space

Irwin is interested in how we perceive a space, and what sorts of interventions can be made to make us perceive a space more. Hockney is interested in how you represent an experience of space in 2D. In Hockney's ideas on perspective I thought a lot about projection, including projecting down to 2D from a multi-dimensional space (like embeddings).

I enjoy both their ideas and arguments there, but again my main takeaway is what a great way to be oriented towards the world. Hockney is always looking at the great paintings of history and new tech like photocopiers with the same attitude of "what can I learn from this", "what can I do with this".

Optics

I think I probably paused my first-read when I got into the section where Hockney tries to prove that renaissance painters used lenses and projections to trace subjects. Not that the idea or how he investigates it isn't interesting, but it is kind of a long digression from the other subjects I found more interesting.

Trees

I enjoyed the last sections where he'd returned to painting. Particularly these thoughts on seeing and capturing trees.

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