Robert Heinecken

After visiting an exhibition, cameraless photography (blog entry 18th March), at the Victoria and Albert museum I came across the artist Heinecken. His work is similar to mine because he used existing images to create his own, manipulating them. Heinecken used the same technique as I do, placing magazine pages on a light table. The images on both sides of the sheet visually merge in unexpected ways.

Sometimes the resulting montages, although not planned by the layouts' designers, are pictorially and conceptually stimulating. In Heinecken's work, "Are you Rea" the text of a cigarette advert saying "More than a million people like what Lark does" was overlaid on an iconic, Christlike figure draped with beads and of indeterminate sex. In another, a monstrously deformed portrait emerged from the fusion of a patterned dress over a grinning face adjacent to the text "Lynda Bird Johnson's Hollywood Beauty Treatment."

Robert Heinecken Study #20, 1970
Black and white photogram of magazine page



Inspired by Heinecken's work, I experimented developing my photographs of magazine pages in black and white. As I have always developed my photographs from this project in colour, it was interesting to see the images in black and white.