What Is A Joiner?
A Joiner is a photographic technique used to create an image consisting of several overlapping photographs to create an image with a collage effect.
What Does A Joiner Look Like?
A joiner looks a lot like a collage of images. Looking at different Joiners I have found that you can use lots of different patterns and techniques to make you joiner. Using these patterns and techniques really help to make each different joiner unique and special. Here are some examples of joiners.
Joiner Artists & Photographers
David Hockney
Hockney is one of the most famous artists that creates joiners. If you ever search online anything to do with Joiner Photography or Joiner Artists he will always come up. Some of his work including his Joiners are some of the most popular and iconic images and paintings ever. When I visited the David Hockney Exhibition in London I was able to view a wide variety of his Joiner work including Paintings, Digital Moving Images and also Photography. He creates these different joiners in a different way each time, which makes each piece really individual and iconic and is special in its own way. For example he created a joiner using photography of a family playing a scrabble game and because he use photography for this piece of work you are able to look at each different part of the joiner and look at it in intense detail and you can see all the different aspects of the image individually as you go through the images to get in all of the detail. However he also made Digital Moving Joiner using screens and showed different seasons throughout the year. This was mainly used for visual effect rather than to show detail so it proves that using a different technique for each different joiner can have a different effect on the audience viewing the images and it can be used for a variety of different things depending on what effect you want your joiner to have. I think that David Hockney’s work is a really good example of this. I have included some examples of his Joiner work and also included a brief explanation on what I thought of the image and how I think it would affect the audience.
This piece is called ‘Pear Blossom Highway’ and this is an example of his photography joiner work. I really like this style of joiner as all the pieces of the image are quite close together and it is very easy to follow where as some of his joiners are quite spaced apart and aren’t as easy to follow along with as the others. Even though he has picked his image apart and changed it quite a bit I still like how you can see a lot of detail and each different part of the image and with a joiner this is something that you always worry that you won’t be able to see and that by taking the image apart and changing the layout you may not be able to see as much detail in it as you would in a normal image.
This next joiner is called ‘Sun On The Pool Los Angeles’. This joiner has been created using Polaroid’s rather than just a collage of normal images. I really like the way this has been pieced together and I think that the face that he has used polaroid’s and placed them equally part from each other makes it look like a photographic puzzle and if you were to take one piece out or mix the pieces up then it would mess up the image and it just wouldn’t work. I also think that because of the way the images have been layer out you don’t just look at the image once and move on you actually go through all of the different images and take in all the detail and look at them as individual images rather than just one whole image. Its almost like he has picked apart the different aspects the image so that people take in the detail of each part individually rather than just one part of the image.
This Joiner is called ‘The Scrabble Game’. This Joiner is created using images printed and collaged together to create a viewing point from the fourth player in the game. If you look at each different person you will see that there re multiple pictures of their aces and bodies and this shows their different facial expressions and their body language throughout the game and how as time goes by and the game gets longer and more intense their emotions and their body language looks different they go from being really happy at the start of the game and then you see them start to get quite bored and stressed. I like the layout of this joiner as it shows the different viewpoints of the fourth player and it shows how they see the other players.
Christian Mar clay
Marclay is an artist who works with Joiners and is most well known for working with a variety of different LP covers to create faces and bodies as Joiners. He uses his work to turn music from a sound form to a physical and visible form. He uses LP covers to create his work and this is what makes it unique because there isn’t many artists that you see currently that us LP covers in there work especially to make something like a joiner. He has also done a lot of other photography work but I am mostly focusing on the joiners as this is something that I want to focus on for my project but I still really like the look of his other pieces of work. When you look at the different LP covers that he uses you can tell his different tastes in music. He uses LP covers from music from the 80’s and 90’s and this shows that the music he is passionate about he incorporates into his work.
This is an example of one of his joiners using three different LP covers to create a top middle and bottom of the body. He has visually represented his idea of music. He has worked well to create this and he has matched up each of the body parts to create body that is all in proportion and in effect looks real which is what he was going for and which is what his goal was when creating these joiners. The three different LP covers all juxtapose themselves because he uses a male in the first one, a female clothed in the second and a female with not much on in the bottom. I think that if I was to create a joiner using people and bodies I would definitely use this style joiner because its something that will easily show someone’s body. However I think they way the different body languages sit together they don’t really fit together. They look believable but he could have used something different like a different cover in order to create something with more meaning.
This is another example of his joiner work, which I like a lot, more than the first piece of work that I analyzed. I feel that this one looks a lot more believable and they way it is matched up and positioned makes it look very real and like it actually could be a real cover on its own and not two different ones matched together. The two he has matched up is a mans top half and a woman’s bottom half of just her legs in some high heels. He has overlapped the two to make it look as if though the mans top half is attached to the woman’s legs and the way he has joined them together is really a good idea. I feel that if you was to make the thing all one color and it have the same text on both it would really look like a cover. However other work that he has done with LP covers are very miss matched and wouldn’t look as believable if they was actually merged together to make just one album cover out of the multiple ones he has used.
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