Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium, breaking through aesthetic and technical limitations of the genre. As the New York Times wrote in the artist’s 2006 obituary: “Instead of treating photographs as the autonomous creations of their makers, as did Ansel Adams and other postwar tastemakers, he viewed them as forms of cultural iconography that reflected the commercialism and venality of contemporary life.Heinecken attended the University of California at Los Angeles where he received his master’s degree in 1960. The University hired him as a professor of photography where he remained for 31 years. In 1963, he founded the photography department at UCLA and helped found the Society for Photographic Education in 1964, serving as chairman in 1970 and 1971. In 2007 Heinecken’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and a 35-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999) that toured to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art that same year. Most recently Heinecken had a museum retrospective Object Matter at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014, which travelled to The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA.
