“My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have. Or, rather, time—lived time.”
“All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them—they stare back, blankly—and presently your concentration begins to fade.”
“They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”
“During the last few years, I’ve come to realize that it has something to do with the amount of time that’s been put into the image.”
“I mean, Rembrandt spent days, weeks painting a portrait. You can go to a museum and look at a Rembrandt for hours and you’re not going to spend as much time looking as he spent painting—observing, layering his observations, layering the time.”
“…the hand took time…”
“And the reason you can’t look at a photograph for a long time is because there’s virtually no time in it…”
David Hockney in Lawrence Weschler,
Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings (2005)
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