Donald R. Blumberg. Untitled from the series Daily Photographs, 1969–1970; gelatin silver print; 16 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Much of the work in the show simply reproduces images from print and televised media, reframing them in subtle but meaningful ways. In the series Daily Photographs 1969–1970, Donald Blumberg photographs newspaper pages, focusing on images related to the Vietnam War while including surrounding text and advertisements. The works reveal the newspaper as a subjective nexus of interrelated information and opinions, instead of as an objective assemblage of discreet facts. His Television Political Mosaics and Television Abstractions (1968–69) are created similarly by photographing evening broadcasts on the television screen. Images of politicians, including Nixon and LBJ, are arranged either in orderly grids or in more chaotic compositions that threaten the intended stability of their original messages. In some works, Blumberg uses darkroom techniques such as solarization to give these familiar faces a more sinister appearance.

Japanese artist Masao Mochizuki also turns his camera towards the television, reproducing images on tightly composed grids in his Television series (1975–76). Mochizuki’s works, however, lack any of Blumberg’s authorial voice. With each frame taken at regularly timed intervals, his composite images do not discriminate between show credits, program drama, or advertisements. The images are all laid out as a constant stream of information and are reproduced at an intimate, miniature scale to draw viewers in, forcing them to actively gaze at content that might otherwise be passively absorbed.

Masao Mochizuki. The Air Power of the World from the series Television, 1976; gelatin silver print; 8 15/16 x 7 7/8 in. Courtesy of Osiris.

Produced thirty-five years after Blumberg’s photographs, Catherine Opie’s Polaroids are a departure from her highly polished portraits and landscapes. Snapped while watching TV, the photos reflect a raw immediacy and are tinged with frustration and humor. Opie assembles groups of Polaroids, mostly depicting newscasts of hot-button issues of the aughts (John Roberts’ Supreme Court hearings, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina), and arranges them to highlight certain themes, often counter to the original intent. In Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul (2004–2005), she juxtaposes images of the brain-dead woman and the pro-life Pope, their faces contorted into similar grimaces.

One of the standout works from the exhibition is Omer Fast’s video CNN Concatenated (2002). Cutting and pasting from multiple news broadcasts, Fast takes one word each from a chorus of talking heads and strings them together to form direct, patchwork addresses to the audience, such as, “I need you to stop pretending to care, to get off your ass, and start acting like you do, all right? This is not a lot to be asking for, is it?”

Catherine Opie. Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul from the series Close to Home, 2004–2005; dye diffusion prints; 15 1/2 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane’s 1978 video The Dictator is one of the only works that doesn’t appropriate already printed or broadcast imagery. Taking the form of a news interview between Duane’s Barbara Walters-like character and Lamelas’ newly deposed Latin American tyrant, the work has a dark humor that takes on a special relevance given our current president’s infatuation with the media, and vice versa. Despite Duane’s probing questions about human-rights abuses or plans for an anti-revolutionary coup, Lamelas’ character evades any judgment or condemnation, revealing the power of media appearances to legitimize the illegitimate.

In addition to the content of the news, some of these artists take aim to reveal its structure. Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham’s video Local TV News Analysis (1980) is a straightforward reminder that news is not simply facts, put out into the world, but part of a system of consumption that is assembled, produced, and packaged. The hour-long video work depicts a typical American family watching the evening news, while in the upper left corner is an inset video of the newsroom. The piece compresses into one scene: the message, medium, and audience.

Robert Heinecken. A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures) (detail), 1984; dye bleach prints; 44 1/4 x 42 1/2 in. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Robert Heinecken—an artist who is famous for adeptly reflecting and refracting media images—offers a parodic take on the search for the perfect newscaster with his multi-panel text and image work A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures) (1984). By layering images of different broadcasters over each other, Heinecken creates a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, pointing out the absurdity of prioritizing the person delivering the news over the news itself.

Breaking News provides a well-rounded and focused, if not comprehensive, survey of artists who question the media’s subjectivity, using its own images and words to do so. The one missed opportunity is that by featuring works that engage primarily with print and broadcast sources, the exhibition stops too soon, overlooking the way almost all of us get our news today, with tweets and Facebook posts becoming as important as long-standing journalistic institutions. This does, however, leave room for another, more contemporary look at artists examining the current, arguably more fraught state of journalism.

Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media is on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through April 30, 2017.

Mohammad Ghazali. Untitled, from Tehran a Little to the Right, 2010-2013; expired Polaroid film; 3 3/8 x 4 1/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran.

The 1970s saw the rise of an active market for photography collection. In 1981, photography critic Gene Thornton reflected on the gains photography made in that decade, and on its evolving position in the art world. In the New York Times, he wrote, “Photography has so recently begun to be taken seriously by museums, collectors, and critics that it may be presumptuous to ask what its present state is. It has been recognized as art, hasn’t it?”[1]

Taking Thornton’s position, then, what is the state of photography as demonstrated within the stalls and storefronts of Paris Photo? Contemporary artists are playing with scale, investigating serial forms, and manipulating photographic processes. Unglee, a French artist with an enigmatic biography, takes hundreds of photographs of tulips. Presented either individually—with a level of detail and sensuousness evocative of a Georgia O’Keefe flower painting—or as masses of subtly distinctive Polaroids, Unglee’s examination verges on the fetishistic.

Floris Neusüss. Nachtbild (48), 1991; photogram, unique; 68 x 42 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles.

Many galleries go for spectacle-inducing, vivid large-scale prints, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, tiny, intimate, exquisitely detailed 4-by-6-inch images. There seems to be no happy medium. Floris Neusüss’ gigantic photograms envelop the viewer in black-and-white, abstract geometries. From the series Nachtstükke, Nachtbild (1991) was made at night, in a garden, by exposing photosensitive paper to a shock of bright light. The resulting image is a dense kaleidoscope of foliage made immersive through its great size. Neusüss employs the spectacle of sheer size to make a natural scene feel new. On the opposite end of the scale are works like Mohammad Ghazali’s Polaroids from the series Tehran a Little to the Right (2010–13). For each photograph, the artist revisited places in Tehran where protesters gathered after Iran’s contentious 2009 elections. Ghazali used expired Polaroid film, which resulted in unpredictable white blotches and a strange greenish-yellow cast that gives the streetscapes a surreal, nearly unrecognizable quality. At just 3 by 4 inches, Ghazali’s pictures draw the viewers in, allowing the political undercurrent to unfurl and sink in.

CJ Heylinger. Hell Mirage #1, 2015; archival inkjet print, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This is not to say that all of these photographic interests are entirely revolutionary. Indeed, scale, seriality, and manipulation have deep roots as rich arenas for photographic investigation. C.J. Heyliger, an MFA candidate at UCLA, manipulates exposure and his film to create fragmented and distorted images of the landscape, as in Hell Mirage #1 (2015). Heyliger’s textured, almost pleated surfaces echo Harry Callahan’s play with multiple exposures in his images of trees. Likewise, both Ghazali’s and Unglee’s use of the Polaroid as their preferred film format draws on a diverse lineage of artists that includes Lucas Samaras and Robert Heinecken. As such, what makes Paris Photo unique is not the setting, on the Paramount Pictures lot with a mix of traditional white-box spaces, and quirky storefronts on the life-size set of New York. Rather, it’s the ability to see in one day, or one weekend, a diversity of perspectives on the state of photography. To answer Thornton’s question, photography is decidedly an art, and one that is still ripe for investigation.

Paris Photo LA was on view in Los Angeles from May 1–3, 2015.

[1] Gene Thornton, “Photography View,” The New York Times, September 6, 1981.

Robert Heinecken. Recto/Verso #2, 1988. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund.

In a dentist’s office, underneath a shadow cast from a fluorescent light on a sickly pot of browning philodendrons atop a chipped coffee table, sit stacks of old magazines. Dog-eared and well-thumbed, rustling with their cheap paper, clad with gaudy covers begging questions and enticements for a passerby to peek into their pages. Time and Glamour, Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle, Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated, a smattering of titles beginning with “Popular.” Flipping through, the nervy bruxists and trenchmouthers fidget until summoned for their scrapings and cleanings, analgesics and block injections, skimming headlines about the White House and the Kennedys, 100 Great Recipes and 100 Gifts from $1.00 to $10.00, Trimmings to Make Parties Fun for Hostesses Too and When He Caught Me in Another Man’s Bedroom. Amidst all of these tidbits and news items, tawdry page-turners and housewifely time-savers, the publishers tuck in a healthy swath of advertisements, the difference between ad and article often fluid. But within these sundry, expected, and quotidian distractions from impending root canals, there appear other unsanctioned pictures.

Across from a duo of models tautly clothed in the latest Parisian fashions, a couple of quite naked ladies, tan lines ablaze, lean in for a carnal smooch. Overlaying the bottle blonde in the brown, boat-like sedan of the Pontiac ad beckons a big-chested lass in negative exposure, naked except for a pair of knee-high go-go boots. Does one imagine an aged dowager keeling over in disgusted shock, a pizza-faced teenage boy with maximalist orthodontia vibrantly sweating as he runs through various plans to casually pocket the magazine for closer, handier examinations? Does it startle, quicken pulses, titillate pink parts, provoke outrage? Does it do anything, or is it just passively accepted, not even seen, a picture received only subliminally by that patient idly flicking through? Sneaking doctored magazines into doctor’s offices and newsstands was only one of artist Robert Heinecken’s punkish tactics from the 1960s till his illness and death in 2007. This ex-marine fighter pilot and full-time prof enjoyed sticking his sticky fingers into the content and form of received culture, all those bombarding images selling us this and that, and usually sex (lust rarely being free for anyone in the Christian, patriarchal, and bourgeois circumstances of postwar America). He did this without using a camera but using the images themselves, beginning with a series of twenty-five photograms from 1964–68 titled Are You Rea after a chopped headline that numerous critics suggest could be “real” or “ready” and to the artist might have been a Duchampian pun on Man Ray. (Both Marcel and Man alongside László Moholy-Nagy were early inspirations.) In this attractive portfolio, reprinted from photographic paper into lithographs, the facing pages in a magazine superimpose their negative images, conflating the two in weird, often suggestive ways. Though his works could be occasionally ham-fisted or literal (one image he slipped into popular magazines was a particularly violent shot from 1971 of a grinning Cambodian soldier hoisting two decapitated heads), the artist mostly avoided letting his work fall into didactic investigations into media power by locating his inquiries in desire, his own desire. Even his breakdowns of news anchors and politicians sometimes have smeary Vaseline on the lens, diffusing and mixing in ways that feel lurid, though sometimes spooky. You can almost tell that the best works are the ones that got him off the most.

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Robert Heinecken is an artist who is hard to pin down. A photographer who rarely used a camera, he founded UCLA’s photography department in 1964. Skeptical of the documentarian role of photography, he mined images from mass media, prefiguring the appropriation strategies of Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine by at least a decade. Despite this, he was never able to achieve the notoriety accorded these artists. The exhibition Robert Heinecken: Sensing the Technologic Banzai, now on view at Cherry and Martin through November 16^th, aims to set the record straight with a reconsideration of his oeuvre.

Robert Heinecken, P.P. Three Women A, 1990; Cibachrome photogram; Edition of 3; 14 x 11 inches, 35.56 x 27.94 centimeters. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Covering work from the 1980s—the second third of Heinecken’s career—the show features four main bodies of work, each showcasing a different artistic technique. Perhaps most well known are his magazine photograms, which he began making in the 1960s (the ones in this exhibition are from around 1990). To make these, Heinecken treated magazine pages like negatives; the resulting image is a composite of both sides of the page. Using mostly advertisements, Heinecken’s only artistic intervention is the selection of the pages. The final images appear natural at first—front and back unified by the common language of seductive luxury—but the more one looks at these, the more an awkward dialogue between the different sources causes an unsettling disjuncture. Heinecken’s skill as an editor is what makes these images so compelling; they attract us with the aesthetics of advertising, and then thwart our gaze by subtly complicating their messages of desire.

Robert Heinecken, Socio Fashio Lingerie #5, 1981; Found image and incised found image, pencil, found magazine text, masking tape on matboard; 18 x 14 inches, 45.72 x 35.56 cm each. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

The earliest works in the show also deal with sex and commerce, albeit in a much more obvious way. Socio Fashio Lingerie #2–#9 (1981) are collages of a sort, featuring pages torn from lingerie catalogues. In each of these small works, a model strikes a pose and looks out at us invitingly. Instead of wearing a nightgown or bra however, each model’s naked body can be seen where these garments should be. Heinecken has carefully cut out the clothes and positioned the catalogue images over bodies from pornographic magazines. The seductiveness of these images is hampered by the unnerving juxtaposition of body parts that never quite match. These works pull back the curtain on the sexuality lying beneath the surface of everyday marketing images. Heinecken manages to critique visual culture while at the same time indulging in its basest aspects. These are cheeky one-liners that, while entertaining, lack the nuance of his photograms.

Robert Heinecken, Misc…Newswoman (Blue), 1984; Dye bleach print videograms, plexiglas frame; 1 of 5-part; 11 x 14 inches each, 27.94 x 35.56 cm each. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

The third series in the exhibition focuses on television news as another aspect of the barrage of contemporary media images. These works from 1984 all feature gauzy images of newswomen that seem to be illuminated from within by a blue or purple light. Heinecken made these videograms by holding a piece of photographic paper up to the television during a newscast, capturing a visual trace of the newscaster. As with his photograms, he has removed himself almost completely from the act of creation. Divorced from their original context and floating uniformly in their inky backgrounds, these striking ghostly visages are at odds with the supposed transparent truth provided by accepted news sources. This message must have seemed especially prescient at a time when cable news was just becoming big business.

Robert Heinecken, Waking Up in News America, 1986; Photolithographs, furniture, mannequins, jacket, picture frames, light, and video monitor; 120 x 120 x 120 inches, 304.8 x 304.8 x 304.8 centimeters approximately. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Accompanying these modest two-dimensional works is a large-scale installation titled Waking Up in News America (1986). Seen here for the first time in almost two decades, the piece consists of a room plastered wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with photolithographs of televisions featuring images of female newscasters. They also cover everything in the room, including two mannequins, a lamp, a television, a chair, a book, etc. Although impressive in its execution, I found myself underwhelmed in the midst of this TV environment. The pervasive influence of mass media may be so ubiquitous at this point that its visual manifestation no longer has the same impact that it did thirty years ago. The photolithographs also lack the presence of the videograms, appearing dull and flat when compared with the supernatural glow of these earlier works.

Despite its unevenness, this exhibition is a welcome recuperation of a long-overlooked but influential artist. Although his source material may be dated, Heinecken’s work still feels relevant and alive. His photograms especially remain engaging as they balance elegant formal juxtapositions with a cool, conceptual distance. His work seems to ask the question: “In a world crowded with images, why make brand new ones when you can create meaning from those that already exist?”

Robert Heinecken, P.P. Three Women A, 1990; Cibachrome photogram; Edition of 3; 14 x 11 inches, 35.56 x 27.94 centimeters. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Covering work from the 1980s—the second third of Heinecken’s career—the show features four main bodies of work, each showcasing a different artistic technique. Perhaps most well known are his magazine photograms, which he began making in the 1960s (the ones in this exhibition are from around 1990). To make these, Heinecken treated magazine pages like negatives; the resulting image is a composite of both sides of the page. Using mostly advertisements, Heinecken’s only artistic intervention is the selection of the pages. The final images appear natural at first—front and back unified by the common language of seductive luxury—but the more one looks at these, the more an awkward dialogue between the different sources causes an unsettling disjuncture. Heinecken’s skill as an editor is what makes these images so compelling; they attract us with the aesthetics of advertising, and then thwart our gaze by subtly complicating their messages of desire.

Robert Heinecken, Socio Fashio Lingerie #5, 1981; Found image and incised found image, pencil, found magazine text, masking tape on matboard; 18 x 14 inches, 45.72 x 35.56 cm each. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

The earliest works in the show also deal with sex and commerce, albeit in a much more obvious way. Socio Fashio Lingerie #2–#9 (1981) are collages of a sort, featuring pages torn from lingerie catalogues. In each of these small works, a model strikes a pose and looks out at us invitingly. Instead of wearing a nightgown or bra however, each model’s naked body can be seen where these garments should be. Heinecken has carefully cut out the clothes and positioned the catalogue images over bodies from pornographic magazines. The seductiveness of these images is hampered by the unnerving juxtaposition of body parts that never quite match. These works pull back the curtain on the sexuality lying beneath the surface of everyday marketing images. Heinecken manages to critique visual culture while at the same time indulging in its basest aspects. These are cheeky one-liners that, while entertaining, lack the nuance of his photograms.

Robert Heinecken, Misc…Newswoman (Blue), 1984; Dye bleach print videograms, plexiglas frame; 1 of 5-part; 11 x 14 inches each, 27.94 x 35.56 cm each. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

The third series in the exhibition focuses on television news as another aspect of the barrage of contemporary media images. These works from 1984 all feature gauzy images of newswomen that seem to be illuminated from within by a blue or purple light. Heinecken made these videograms by holding a piece of photographic paper up to the television during a newscast, capturing a visual trace of the newscaster. As with his photograms, he has removed himself almost completely from the act of creation. Divorced from their original context and floating uniformly in their inky backgrounds, these striking ghostly visages are at odds with the supposed transparent truth provided by accepted news sources. This message must have seemed especially prescient at a time when cable news was just becoming big business.

Robert Heinecken, Waking Up in News America, 1986; Photolithographs, furniture, mannequins, jacket, picture frames, light, and video monitor; 120 x 120 x 120 inches, 304.8 x 304.8 x 304.8 centimeters approximately. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Accompanying these modest two-dimensional works is a large-scale installation titled Waking Up in News America (1986). Seen here for the first time in almost two decades, the piece consists of a room plastered wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with photolithographs of televisions featuring images of female newscasters. They also cover everything in the room, including two mannequins, a lamp, a television, a chair, a book, etc. Although impressive in its execution, I found myself underwhelmed in the midst of this TV environment. The pervasive influence of mass media may be so ubiquitous at this point that its visual manifestation no longer has the same impact that it did thirty years ago. The photolithographs also lack the presence of the videograms, appearing dull and flat when compared with the supernatural glow of these earlier works.

Despite its unevenness, this exhibition is a welcome recuperation of a long-overlooked but influential artist. Although his source material may be dated, Heinecken’s work still feels relevant and alive. His photograms especially remain engaging as they balance elegant formal juxtapositions with a cool, conceptual distance. His work seems to ask the question: “In a world crowded with images, why make brand new ones when you can create meaning from those that already exist?”

Robert Heinecken: Sensing the Technologic Banzai is on view at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles through November 16, 2013.

Robert Heinecken. From the portfolio Recto/Verso, 1989; Cibachrome (dye destruction) photogram; 11 x 14 in. Image courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.

Robert Heinecken and Edmund Teske: Experimental Photomontage at Robert Koch Gallery showcases two distinct voices in contemporary American photography that used similar processes to very different ends. Heinecken’s bold photograms and lithographs—composed of imagery and text from advertisements, soft-core porn magazines, and other printed matter—reflect the artist as an appropriator who intentionally mirrors the cultural conditions in which the work is produced. In contrast, Teske’s montages of people and places, sourced from his own negatives along with found postcards and re-photographed images, suggest a more Romantic view of the artist as a privileged communicator of a decidedly personal perspective.

Heinecken’s sexually suggestive work offers a troubling reflection of the representation of women in mass media. Recto/Verso (1989) is a portfolio of color prints Heinecken made by directly exposing backlit magazine pages to photographic paper, in lieu of a negative, resulting in a composite of both sides of the original printed page. While magazine readers would see the images sequentially as they turn the pages, Heinecken’s photograms fuse them into single pictures. In one of the most charged photograms in the series, the profile of a woman drinking from a phallic bottle is superimposed on an image of a woman biting on a strand of pearls. Heinecken makes explicit the casual sexism embedded in the images created by advertising firms and their clients by creating a before-and-after narrative of fellatio, visually punning on the double meanings of the bottle and the pearl necklace.

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