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Snapshots

The English artist Walter Sickert’s innovative approach to portraiture—based on photographs and press cuttings which he enlarged and mechanically transferred to the canvas—was a clear precedent for the work of later artists such as David Hockney and Ronald B. Kitaj. The photograph was the principal source of Hockney’s portraits and the artist has never aimed to investigate his sitters’ emotions but rather to offer an image based on his own feelings at the time. Kitaj for his part has investigated the relationship between the visual and poetic through a subtle combination of photographic images, references to his own personal experiences and allusions to literature and popular culture.