Robert Heinecken: Copywork

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Photographically illustrated paper-covered boards; no dust jacket as issued. Photographic work, periodicals and text by Robert Heinecken. Essay by Kevin Moore. Includes a chronology, exhibition history and a bibliography. Designed by Neil Donnelly. 192 pp., with 75 four-color plates. 12-1/4 x 9-3/4 inches. Published on the occasion of exhibitions at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. New in publisher's shrink wrap. About Robert Heinecken: Robert Heinecken is one of the most innovative and influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of postmodern photographic practices, and his work anticipated the Pictures Generation artists of the 1970s and 1980s who practiced the appropriation of images from advertising and the media. A self-described "para-photographer," Heinecken was always challenging the conventions of the then-accepted "canon" of photography. He transformed the possibilities of the medium, and had a profound impact on many photography-based artists who studied with him. Influenced by Dada and Surrealism, especially Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and John Heartfield, Heinecken worked with numerous photographic techniques and materials, oftentimes combining them with various printmaking processes. In addition to offset lithography and etching, he made use of film transparencies, photographic emulsion on canvas, gelatin silver prints mounted to wood (e.g., "Multiple Solution Puzzle" Series), Polaroid materials, mixed media collage and photograms (e.g., ARE YOU REA and Recto/Verso Series). His source materials included popular "lifestyle" magazines, advertising, images taken directly from television screens, pornography and news photographs. Through his ground-breaking works, Heinecken transformed American notions of consumerism, war, eroticism and mass media. From Robert Heinecken (in the mid-1960s): "We constantly tend to misuse or misunderstand the term reality in reference to photographs. The photograph itself is the only thing that is real, that exists. (There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.)." An excerpt from a text written by Carl Chiarenza (in 1976): "He uses existing photographs. and their reproductions because they have littered the world and our minds with unlimited examples of every conceivable image of truth, beauty, banality, eroticism, brutality, pornography, consumerism, political idea, personality, idol, and ideal. Indeed one is hard put to name anything that has not been replaced by a photographically derived image. His recycling of these images makes this astounding point before making any other. Heinecken knows the photograph is not real. He also knows that most of us still believe it is. The camera eye is lusty and insatiable, a perfect match for Heinecken's eye." Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado and in 1942 his family relocated to Riverside, California. After serving in the US Marine Corps, he earned a BA in 1959 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued his studies, specializing in printmaking and graduating with an MFA in 1960. He founded the graduate program for photography at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. Heinecken died at age 74 in 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From the publisher: "Robert Heinecken (1931-2006), who headed the photo program at UCLA for three decades, was one of America's most influential contemporary, conceptual photographers. Heinecken rarely used a camera; his definition of photography encompassed everything related to the photo, as his interest was on the relation of methods and formalism--often in an irreverent and humorous way--to popular media.".…