Science & Tech Quote by David Hockney

Hockney is really talking about a lost delay: the gap between looking and knowing. In the film-era “ordinary camera,” the picture doesn’t exist for you in the moment of taking it. It becomes a kind of IOU you cash in later, after processing, after time has blurred the original scene. So you “remember what you’ve taken” instead of seeing what you’ve made. That’s not a nostalgic complaint; it’s a diagnosis of how technology scripts perception.

The sly move is that he frames the camera as a memory machine that can fail you. Photography often gets treated as proof, as a mechanical witness. Hockney flips it: the mechanical process forces you into a mental reconstruction, and reconstruction is where subjectivity sneaks in. You’re not just documenting; you’re narrating to yourself, filling in gaps, correcting the shot in your head. The “meaning” he mentions isn’t symbolism; it’s the felt sense of the image, the immediate feedback loop that tells you whether the picture is alive.

The 1982 marker matters because Hockney is an artist obsessed with seeing as an active practice, not passive intake. Early digital preview and later phone cameras collapse the delay, turning photography into something closer to drawing: look, adjust, respond. He’s pointing to a cultural pivot where images stop being deferred memories and start being instant decisions, with all the new compulsions and freedoms that brings.