Robert Heinecken: A Material History

Over the last four decades, Robert Heinecken has amused, educated and often shocked viewers with his pointed, irreverent photographic works. So provocative are Heinecken's subjects and obsessions--the Vietnam War, pornography, masculinity and femininity, the media marketplace--that many critics and other observers rank either as avid fans or staunch detractors. In recent years, the impact of Heinecken's career within and beyond the world of photography has been indisputable. His manipulations and iterations of mass-produced imagery are echoed by artists as eclectic as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Richard Price and others. In today's media-saturated environment, Heinecken's work with its wit, know-how, and focus on media materials, is as relevant now as when he made it. The Robert Heinecken Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with its extensive collection of fine prints, papers, support materials and random objects, provides the inspiration for this reassessment. Robert Heinecken: A Material History positions Heinecken less as a fringe element of photographic practice and sensibility and more as a pioneer of the visual, helping to integrate alternative methods as part of the canon.

Essays by Mark Alice Durant and Amy Rule.

Paperback, 10.5 x 11 in./112 pgs / 56 color BW29 duotone 0 ~ Item D20258

Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a fighter pilot in the 1950s before pursuing a Master of Arts degree at the University of California at Los Angeles. Heinecken has had 60 solo shows since 1964, including a major 1976 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, which travelled to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Frederick S. Wight Galleries at UCLA. Other solo exhibitions have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center for Creative Photography, the Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Heinecken currently lives in Chicago.