A004 - Multiple Perspectives

Multiple Perspectives

When I find a scene of nature with the sensation of change, it is seldom a single perspective or spot. It is typically a space that consists of many places or angles that give the sensation as a whole. The space can hardly be appreciated by a single optical perspective. I have to move forward, backward, left and right, up and down. This naturally leads to a multiple perspective.

The challenge is how I can convey this inherently multiple perspective scene through a two dimensional surface. If I place all the fragmented single perspectives connected to be natural, it will look warped and distorted. This will trigger too much attention as they would look weird and interesting at best. It would damage the appreciation of the very quality that I want to convey. However, if I do not connect them naturally, it will become a mosaic of independent pictures. It will never give a concept of space that I am looking at things that are connected.

David Hockney claims that a single point optical perspective is not a reality of our visual experiences of landscape. Our visual experiences change as we move ourselves within the landscape, unlike it is stuck in one single point in photography. He used multiple cameras angled differently within the same space to convey this experience in his The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011, Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010) and Seven Yorkshire Landscapes, 2011. He divided the entire surface into 9 or 18 equal-sized frames such that each frame shows the right region of the scene relative to the center. For instance, the upper-left frame shows the upper-left region of the scene, while the bottom-right frame shows the bottom-right region of the scene. Also, the angle of each camera is only slightly tilted so that pictures of two adjacent frames give a sense of discontinuity and continuity at the same time. The objects at the boundaries are not distorted to connect each other. The entire surface does not look like a mosaic of independent pictures, either. Brilliant!

May 2022

Pyungchul Kim