The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation. Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America.

This groundbreaking survey of significant work and ideas focuses on imagemakers who have pushed beyond the boundaries of photography as a window on our material world. Through interviews with more than 40 key artists, this book explores a diverse group of curious experimentalists who have propelled the medium’s evolution by visualizing their subject matter as it originates from their mind’s eye. Many favor the historical techniques commonly known as alternative photographic processes, but all these makers demonstrate that the real alternative is found in their mental approach and not in their use of physical methods. Within this context, photographer and photography historian Robert Hirsch outlines the varied approaches these artists have utilized to question conventional photographic practices, to convey internal realities, and to examine what constitutes photographic reality. Hirsch explores the half-century evolution of these concepts and methodologies and their popularity among contemporary imagemakers who are merging digital and analog processes to express what was thought to be photographically inexpressible. Read an interview with the author at Photo.net: http://photo.net/learn/photographer-interviews/robert-hirsch

Robert Heinecken (1931- 2006) has been called one of America's most influential contemporary, conceptual photographers, and yet he rarely used a camera. His definition of photography encompassed everything related to the photo; rather than focusing on the photographic image as a creation derived solely from a camera, his interest was on the relation of methods and formalism - often in an irreverent and humorous way - to popular media. This first large-scale monograph presents an overview of Henicken's work from the 1960s - 1990s, highlighting his exploration of the material possibilities of the medium, and how he created new methods to record and produce photographic objects using collage, lithography, Polaroid, silver gelatine prints, color processes, digital prints and experimental uses of darkroom chemistry. Exhibition: Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, USA / Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, USA / Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, USA.

"In 1970, photography curator Peter C. Bunnell organized the exhibition Photography into Sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing together twenty-three photographers and artists from across the United States as well as Vancouver, British Columbia, whose work challenged accepted practices and categories. The Photographic Object 1970 serves as an exhibition catalogue after the fact, an oral history, and critical reading of exhibitions and experimental photography during the 1960s and 70s. It proposes precedents for contemporary artists who continue to blur the boundaries between photography and other art mediums."--Provided by publisher.

'Speaking in Tongues...' brings, for the first time, two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation. The exhibition examines how Berman and Heinecken bridged modernist and emerging post-modernist trends by ushering in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Their works are explored within the unique cultural context of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches.

Photographs taken between 1938 and the present show the streets and people of Cairo, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.