Few American photographers are as influential as Robert Heinecken, yet the man rarely picked up a camera. The late artist—whose thoroughgoing exhibition is on view at Chelsea's Friedrich Petzel Gallery—was a restless creator who produced hundreds of objects that include collages, lithographs, Polaroids, silver gelatin prints, photograms, and something he called "cutouts" (life-size figures of men, women, and animals in the grips of the artist's own absurd consumerist riddles). A creator devoted to pointing out the essential difference between our modern-day empire of pictures and the realities it depicts, Heinecken led a one-man campaign to frustrate the cowing effects of mechanical reproduction. Less a strict practitioner of photography than a devoted tinkerer, this West Coast visionary turned some of the more manipulative processes of Madison Avenue into a volatile, visceral, even racy portrait of... More >>>