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David Hockney was one of the first artists I noticed. When I saw his joiner photographs I was still at school, and they were relatively new. I made these photographs of floral arrangements as a response to something he was once quoted as saying about photography:

 

“My main argument was that photography could not be looked at for a long time… You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter.”

(Hockney, 1980, Cameraworks, from an essay by Lawrence Weschler)

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I wanted to know if, after all, he could be proved wrong. My theory was that in the case of an image with enough surface complexity the eye would be forced to travel from one point to another. I supposed that the onlooker would return to the image repeatedly, with new elements revealed to them upon each successive viewing; the gaze of the onlooker might be held indefinitely.

An attempt was made to create such an image with intertwining flowers and colored light. The project was unlike anything I had tackled before, so much that I did not recognize myself in the results. The arrangements seem as alien to me now as they did then, but enough time has passed that I have finally become the onlooker myself. I am pleased to find that when I test one of them with my own eyes, I find new details in the image and relationships between its elements that I had not noticed before. 

Later, much later, and long after I had completed this series of floral studies, I would discover the writings of Vilem Flusser, in which I found further support for my theory:

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“While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can become ‘after’: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process.”

(Flusser, 1983, Towards a Philosophy of Photography)