David Hockney Interview: Photoshop is Boring 

I love this wonderfull reflection and the quote “ its a human being looking at an owl” - the human eyes can see differently - just wonderfull

He didn't say Photoshop is boring. He said that it helps everything look the same. Everything now has to look totally polished and perfect. People aren't drawing anymore they are taking photos or simply using the real thing (i.e. an owl).

Wonderful, witty, intelligent, charming and funny as always.

Quick tip; Hockney never outright called Photoshop boring. Watch the video before you make the assumption the title is accurate.

He doesn't say "Photoshop is boring", he argues that what people are doing with it commercially is boring. And that's probably why did does Ipad paintings now.

Some people will simply not get the meaning of what Hockney's saying because they are the very producers of the boredom he refers to. The need to come up with a simple title for an interview like this, multiplied by the clickbait factor, lead the video's publisher to pick that particular bite, naturally stripped out of its context. Hockney is simply pointing towards the evidence that the use of a highly standardized toolset (by a mostly exploited and creativelly crippled workforce, if I may add) for image making in the entertainment industry leads to a repetitive and, yes, very boring collection of works. Which is what we see on any magazine cover and every pop-up ad. He's not discussing the artistic use of photoshop which, I believe Hockney would agree, should be regarded on a case-by-case basis.

love his sense of humour

A mind as sharp as a needle,every brushstroke means something to the collective painting,the ability to understand every nuance of a medium and get the best from it,the ability to produce lots of paintings because he enjoys the many materials he uses,never afraid to study the past masters and emulate in his own modified way,sees every object no matter how mundane as a subject and become art,his longevity as an artist who has stood the test of time,love his work or hate it his success speaks for itself,his views on Photoshop has made me enjoy wet art even more.

People are really going overboard with the parsing of the title vs what was said in the video and I think this is a mistake. What Photoshop does, as all computer programs do, is allow you create steps that are reproducible. Both, painting and old style photography do not. When we talk about commercial photography, you have editors of magazines who want a particular style, and sometimes they may want to re-create a style from another magazine. Photoshop allows you to create "Best Practices" which standardizes how pictures will look, which is effective for deadlines. 30 years ago, magazines where created 3 months before publication to allow the printers to take the mock-ups and transfer them to type. Now, it is 1/3 the time thanks to desktop publishing and photo-editing software. The trade-off is less creativity, which magazine publishers were generally not comfortable with anyway. That is the crux of the problem: magazine publish want what they believe works which leads to homogeneity which is the staleness that David Hockney is talking about. Yes, you can be creative with Photoshop, but magazines want their deadlines met. Photoshop promotes homogeneity over creativity.

" LIFE is lurking everywhere ! " Great quote. I could listen to David Hockney for all eternity, and then some. ( Why does somebody keep walking in front of the camera ? It's obvious they're filming the interview. )

H O C K N E Y steals the show, he is just being himself. love that old guy

Telling a cop you're not into bondage after getting a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt 😋

thanks for posting

Yes....we need more "owlness" in the world. 🦉

Such a visionary; doesn’t give a f.ck just makes stuff his own way - that’s a real artist ! And he makes very good stuff 👍

I'm dodging and burning a headshot as I listen to this, thinking, "He isn't wrong." >video's over >goes back to retouching his image

I am a photographer and have used digital since over twenty years...I agree with Mr H.

David is correct. Kodak stopped making fixative over a decade ago now. He said he is very technical, so he knows what he's talking about for sure. They still make fixer, but it is not the same thing as fixative. Fixative really made the image permanent like he says, but fixer lasts only half as long. It was a sad day when they stopped it put many people out of work. However many people bought very large stocks of fixative, and if refrigerated, it will last for decades. If you decide to use film, there is still some left, there is one company still making it in England, I think they are called PiLford. They make super 8mm and 35mm films in 1000ft loads so you can hand wind your own at home. If you need fixative, just Google it, and I am sure you will be able to get it from someone. I prefer digital, it looks sooooo much better, none of those scratches and dirt you see on old fashioned film photography. Some times it even has a white stuff stuck to it, an old photographer told me it's because they used fixer instead of fixative.

He's essentially saying "photoshop is being used negatively, to excessively touch up images, homogenising them", which in the context he's speaking about it true! It's exactly the same as people criticising AutoTune in music, where it gets slapped on hip hop/R&B vocals almost as standard, which to a lot of people becomes really boring to listen to. It's a useful tool for the audio engineer working to a tight deadline, who has been given sub-standard vocals to work with... but it's the negative attitudes that come with it that start to annoy people. The idea that you don't have to be able to perform an excellent vocal take, you can just "fix it in the mix" does take something from the sound of the music. Equally, he'd think nothing of solving the technical problems of photography with photoshop, bringing out or adding in the colour that he feels is lacking, to artistically improve the image, not create a false sense of "everyone has unrealistically perfect skin", but to better represent what the human eye sees.

Most interesting.

lol that bondage bit

No, he doesn't say the sentence "Photoshop is boring," but he uses the word boring several times to discuss what he perceives as the effects of using software, particularly Photoshop, in visual images. He mentions how Photoshop tends to be used, to clean up digital photos, put in highlights and get rid of blemishes. He is talking about the transition from chemical to digital photography. And yes, I believe Hockney notes that the effects of Photoshop have been to make mass media images boring. Hence the title, "Photoshop is boring."

I think the Camera Obscura as used by Vermeer was way beyond it's time, pretty cool though. Hi from Australia 🎨🎨

I love Hockneys voice AND paintings

WWD and Gap magazines had the most wonderful fashion drawings full of creative individuality but today there are very few who know how to draw without using a mouse.

Being able to use Photoshop doesn't make you a photographer. Moving pixels around a computer screen might be a skill in itself, but of course it isn't photography.

Film is still doing strong. I develop and print my own black and white photographs.

He's incredible

Photoshop is boring "if you don't know how to use it" Painting is crazy boring "if you don't know how to paint"

He made a lot of good points about photoshop. And he pretty funny at the end.

David says that magazines look boring, because Photoshop polishes photography and images look stale, not that Photoshop is boring. Photoshop is a tool, a means to an end.

So very astute. And he's right about bondage. It is fun sometimes.

Thankful for David Hockney and his dogs absolutely brilliant artist absolutely correct today’s photography is BORING , print is dead unfortunately

I dug out an old book of Hockney drawings. They are good but don't have the vitality of Schiele, Kokoschka (not sure of spelling) or some other artists of that era. They do however reflect his own candid way of seeing, transient people in hotel rooms and the like, as do his camp swimming pool images. The world would be poorer if they did not exist. Some of his most relatable images are of his parents and sister who were clearly generous with their time and enabled him to engage in intense scrutiny of sitters he cared about over a lifetime. He is versatile and intellectually curious. His landscapes look a lot more comfy than those of Van Gogh. Give me a Van Gogh any time.

@drcroc2 but what's more difficult? Trying to make something interesting out of something that already exists, or something that doesn't?

A critic of Australia's most prestigious art prize, the Archibald, asked viewers to spot photography on canvas with paint on top. No wonder so much portraiture is a static bore.

He is absolutely correct: it is the triumph of homogenised vacuity.

Indeed, the camera misses a lot, distorts the perspective, only sees one light value etc. And as for the greens….he’s right about that too. And East Yorkshire is wonderful…nobody around.

Still sharp and witty!

I really like this guy.

Reminds me of Fred Dibnah the way he speaks. Both old school and worth listening to.

I love real drawing. Photoshop can be tedious, but it's such a cool powerful app. Apples and oranges.

With all due respect, I disagree with Mr Hockney. I still photograph with film and use my darkroom regularly. In fact, film photography still being taught in colleges and is making a resurgence. Digital has taken over in commercial photography but not in fine art photography. Illford is still manufacturing film and chemicals.

So funny, Hockney says e.g. photoshop "polishes photography" as though photoshop woke up one morning and got on with it. People do the work. They used to do the same work with airbrushes back in the day...

I think one of the main themes here is that there's a fine line between the artistic value in work done on photoshop vs. real chemical photographs.

But I was inspired to get up and paint.

Yes indeed - this period of artistic history will go down as a photoshopped mannequin ... boring perfection ....

I like this guy.

"There is more owl-ness there than in the stuffed owl." An excellent metaphor about the difference between characterization and verisimilitude, as well as what consciousness of our own subjectivity has to do with objectivity; which is to say that they're the same thing. As for the stuffed owls out there who don't get that, and to which he also alludes with sly hilarity, I have long since despaired of trying to explain such matters to them: You can no more teach the delights of playing with hyperbole to someone who is insensitive to nuance than you can by magic endow a sunless work-horse with a sense of sensory frolic. A similar principle pertains to how Photoshop is most used in publishing, and to most of its users in publishing: These poor polishing machines, grinding away and employed at rates that wouldn't inspire dogs, much less people to aesthetic feats, may as well be detailing cars for all the difference they make to enhancing human perception of the human condition. So yes, maybe Photoshop is boring as a chisel or any other basic tool of art and industry, and no, he is not saying that anyone and everyone who uses it is also boring, anymore than Michelangelo was for using a chisel. He is only trying to put it in perspective, so as not to make too much of things and too little of persons. He may not be literary enough to put it clearly as that, but he's got the idea. Do you see it better now? I would extend the metaphor most strenuously to music, to which I am most devoted: You could take all the Strads of all the great concert violinists and put them into a set of dull-eared hands and what you'd get would be as dull as what you'd get putting fabulously rich digital music synthesis suites into the same hands. For the same reason, not everyone who takes to digital synthesis is a dullard, either as composer or executor, and there is much gorgeously expressive music that has been made using it during the last 40 yeas, a fact which no one 40 or older, and with an ear good enough to deserve the name of fine, and a will good enough to deserve the name of searching, and time and means ample enough for selection, can be unaware of in consequence of the comprehensive musical memory those lead to when combined. Of all the foolish consistencies that hobgoblin small minds, the one that most persistently plagues them is to make an either-or matter of something that is question of proportion and apt combination of parts, persons, uses, motives. Small minds only want to find a side in a battle to fight to no purpose, and so set out to set up either-or sides in order to draw an arbitrary line over which to argue. The last thing they ever do is talk at length about particular processes, and their general consequences, because if they did the unruly bad-strife to which all their thought processes tend and prefer would be obvious as what a brawl says about what brawlers like to do, which they will never admit, for the insight would be far to dark to bear, a grim index of fate. They belong on battlefields, in the stands at sporting events, drudging in the earthly purgatories of interminable feuds. Such is the measure, and kind , of their contentiousness. That is not the artist's way in our time or any other, though idiocy is to some degree mixed in everyone.

I agree with him 100%. I only use Lightroom as a tool which is all I need. Who’s the muppet that keeps walking in front of camera ?

Smart guy, good artist. He did not say Photoshop sucks.

love

I feel this exact same ways about all movies and shows in the last years, they look to clean , sterile, and boring.

Not sure where he got the idea that fixer chemicals aren't available anymore. It is readily available online and in photo stores and still manufactured by both Ilford and Kodak.

When it comes to aesthetic, Hockney is always right 😂

beautiful

James Cowman you should be ashamed of yourself. Hockney's paintings are never dull and neither is he or what he attempts to do. You actually make no sense, you are the rambler! Hockney is an old man, part of the establishment and not scared to use new tools and new ways to create new expression - he really is a great artist. Please go out and paint more, please read a few of the books written about him or by him...I don't get how you dont get it?! Hockney's paintings make me re-study nature and I see things I hadn't noticed before. If you see work he produced on ipad and iphone, he captures a truth of the moment which is so difficult to do with more conventional tools/methods.

i agree! 100%

Correct

I was a working pro though the 90s to now and I will say it.. photoshop has destroyed actual photographs. There is mostly generic crap today. Artists get it.

And now, as a counter-reaction to perfect insta pictures, analog is back. In Paris, fashionable social platforms only allow posts of analogue and imperfect pictures. History isn't linear, isn't it :)

We must be always more creative. Technik is not the answer. Answer is in what do you want to share with the others. How can I fix the Idea?

You can do anything visually orientated with Photoshop, plus, Hockney has used photography in oh so many ways in his art.

Hockney is a painters' painter.

Photoshop is to photography as electronic, digital sound is to a learned musician. True ART requires a human touch.

he's very good at this sort of thing

I wish I could hear David Hockney's opinion of A.I.

actually analog is not dead :)

nice, I film the process of my art

This only shows that if people are after using photoshop as a commercial exercise of course it will used as a to ol for transforming the imperfect into the perfect, your employees will demand conformity. . But if you are a creative artist your imagination can use any program and tool in the digital world in the same way you do in all your other creative experiments and your vision and thinking will be toThe fore as usual.

Isn't he marvellous!

I like your tie pressure boys style tie and jacket I feel a magnetism to red wine and ambience can we shop for red wines I love David Hockney but you cannot tell anyone see

Photoshop makes retouching easier; back in the dark ages the retouch artists used an airbrush on a C print.

love Hockney talking about pictures. He knows a thing or two about it, I guess ;-) Btw why was he never sirred?? Influential figure in British arts, is he not??

bond edge

David Hockney is an amazing artist, probably my favorite living one right now, but he's pretty boring to listen to! Nevertheless, I find it interesting what he said about chemical photography having been replaced with digital photography, and how that's changing the layout of the landscape. One thing he didn't mention is how easy it's become to fake photos these days and how difficult it's becoming to be able to discriminate between reality and fantasy as far as photography goes, which is pretty scary to me!

Is that vodka at the end there?

Photoshop or should I say the artist using Photoshop has changed over the years. Yes we still have the airbrush artists smoothing everything out in Photoshop. But we also have other artists who can make oil looking paintings in Photoshop. Photoshop is a tool.

Hahaha the last comment is so true

I can understand his point but there's no doubt that chemicals were damaging and poisoning our eco system. The evolution of technology can't be stop. Picasso was a painter not a photographer and you can't compare a photograph with a painting, their origins are different.

bondage!

Francis Ford Coppola stop shooting film in the '80's w/ 'one from the heart' due to the toxic pollution problem of film processing chemicals.

David Hockney

11 years later, people are going back to chemical photography. To take his quote about landscape painting… It’s not that Photoshop is boring…it’s the way people use Photoshop that has become boring.

why am i here

Life and death are bondage partners ☺️

I wish I could reply to Sonlogosis but alas, that opportunity is expired. I'll just say here he's absolutely wrong. I've been an artist for over thirty years and both paint and use Photoshop to a professional level. Both require thought and skill. The array of skills involved in oil and watercolor painting do take many more years and a lot more practice to acquire and master, that's true, because even oils are nowhere near as forgiving as digital art programs. However, Photoshop, Illustrator and the rest can't be picked up by anyone at all and used proficiently on the spot. It does take time and effort and in the end, talent matters. Talent shows. Photoshop in the hands of an artist verses a semi-motivated student looking to get what they thought would be an easy A yields a *very* different outcome. On the other hand, the Photoshop defenders here dissing Hockney's work are also wrong. His paintings and collages have a place in the history of our cultural development for a reason. His work may or may not be their cup of tea, but it's going to stay in the history books for the foreseeable future, whether they like it or not.

He knows exactly what hes talking about. I don't..

Love Hockney's work! He's not saying Photoshop is boring he's saying the way some people use it has become boring... . I wonder if David, who has made an iPad and a stylus come alive would do the same with Photoshop? I paint with the brush tool in Photoshop..michaelwelchart.com

Photoshop was not launched in 1999.

More owlness, indeed!

Kodak never stopped making fixative. They went through a phase where they thought they would have to stop production of FILM, not fixative. But they're back on their feet and producing film once again. He might be a dick about photography and its place in the world, but he is right about the boring, stale look of magazine from photoshop now. And that there are still still a few technical problem, but that just leaves room for improvement and proves how alive photography is.

Chemical photography has not ended.

Seatbelt bondage huh? If you need me I'll be in my room googling...

I haven't looked at a fashion magazine in a long time. Photoshop is a tool, but everyone has become a copy machine...therefore boring.

Ground breaker

PS is just a tool (and a very useful tool) It depends how you use it. Too much mouth organ in a Rock band is boring too.

Photographic representations and modifications are very bad now. I was never interested in Vermeer until I see the his original work. Most of contemporary hyperrealistic artworks have so poor colour values because they use digital photography as a start and destination point . I don't understand why these people are painting :-) 

seriously I defy you to define what an 'artist' is. If you've check'd out the 'Secret Knowledge' documentary you'll have seen how the old masters traced over projections. That is basically a step away from photography. Yes taking moody black and white photos of a lawn chair doesn't make you an artist but neither does reproducing a masterpiece stroke for stroke because you've added nothing new... Or does it? that is the eternal question... Also not a photographer btw

"Chemical photography has ended ... Kodak stopped making fixative ..." What is he talking about..? Kodak still makes chemicals along with Fuji, Ilford, and smaller companies like Tetenal and Adox. Development of colour film (C41, E6) and B&W film remains largely unchanged, though the film stocks available are thinning. It's strange that such an important artist would be so profoundly misinformed.