Reflections on The Hockney Falco Thesis and its relevance on Art and Visual Culture Education.

by Aimee Weintz Allen

August 26, 2025

Twenty-four years ago, as an avid film photographer, I became interested in the premise of the artist’s, David Hockney’s, ground-breaking theory on art and optics, first presented in his book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001, 2006). In which, Hockney asserts that the evolution of realism in Western art corresponds to the early use of optics. This use included lenses and simple ‘mirror-lenses,’ by such artists as van Eyck, Campin, Lotto, Caravaggio, Ingres and others.

According to Hockney, such artist-engineers revolutionized image making in ways ever-more relevant today, then when they themsevles first projected miraculous motion pictures for themselves.

What made Hockney's “hunch” so groundbreaking was that it is un-apologetically born out of an arts-based research practice. Hockney’s art practice one rooted in drawing, painting, photography and cross-disciplinary collaboration with other experts from various fields. From this practice a ‘bigger picture’ emerged for Hockney himself. And because he is also an arts-based educator - ultimately the public at large.

Hockney’s “hunch” turned back the clock on the early adoption of optics by artists more than a quarter century. By considering how space and light were handled and applied in the past, he continues to shape our visual present, as well as our futures, through his work. Quite consequently, many leading art historians enthusiastically expressed skepticism at the time of Hockney’s presentation of ideas and still do today - while others, like me, have gone on to be transformed by it - and are now teaching it, as a successful case study for arts-based education.

Hockney’s philosophical pondering of light and it’s transmutation through optics stacks layers of knowledge, from spectacles to telescopes, the mirrorlens to the camera Lucida, the film camera to the computer, to portable devices, and now - of course - to visual systems in concert with AI.

To put it even more simply, Hockney imagined these artists using a new tool - frequently and often - just as he does, unashamed, as a disciplined creative - to do more…to see more.

Hockney’s obsession with the adoption of optics by earlier artists ultimately lead him to collaborate with Dr. Charles M. Falco, University of Arizona Professor of Optics, Chair Condensed Matter Physics. A life-long photographer in his own right. Falco provided Hockney with the strategies, tools and calculations needed to effectively demonstrate the re-discovery of the ‘mirror lens.’

As a consequence of my interest in these matters, I applied for and served, from 2006-2009, as Professor Falco’s Research Laboratory Assistant in Falco Group, at the University of Arizona, College of Optics. And, ten years later, on a vacation in Florence, re-enacted for myself several of the experiments Hockney himself re-created (by such master’s as Brunelleschi - see adjacent video) using a simple shaving mirror I bought at the gift shop inside the Museum of San Marco.

Hockney and Falco’s collaborative re-discovery of mirrors as lenses, for artistic use specifically, illustrates how lenses deliver quick, accurate, relevant reference material for artists - i.e. the goods. That a simple shaving mirror can be applied as a lens, in order to project a bright, well-oriented, traceable image of a subject, was hardly understood or accepted in 2001. And between the economic advantage it would give an artist in combination to the sacred mystery of it all, one can imagine why it was kept secret for this application specifically.

If we think of technology from this perspective - through this lens, so-to-speak - then we must begin to ask ourselves what applied, arts-based knowledge, is acquired in the doing and might be lost with the emergence of AI.

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For a full account of Hockney & Falco’s collaboration and its relevance for arts-based education and instruction, seeImaging Spaceland, The Hockney-Falco Thesis: An Arts-based Case Study of Interdisciplinary Inquiry, by Aimée Littlewood Allen (née Weintz), University of Arizona, ProQuest, 2007.