'A revolution in seeing.' (photocollages of David Hockney)

'A revolution in seeing' Up to February 1982 David Hockney scorned the camera as nothing more than a recording device. Photographs did not hold his attention. "You'd never look at a photo for more than thirty seconds," he said, "unless there were a thousand faces and you were looking for your mother."

Though he took "holiday snaps" beginning in 1963 and made photographs as preliminary studies for his paintings from 1968 on, he considered the camera inferior to life drawing as a means of rendering "weight and volume". In his paintings, especially through 1972, he exploited the photograph's intensification of effects of light and the flat, dazzling colour of commercial processing but found photography false to perception and to …