Quotes by
Robert Heinecken

Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.

An aspect of the work has to do with altering the literal/cultural meaning of existing public images by making minimal changes and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.

I am interested in the relationships and play between an unfamiliar picture/object context and the familiar photographic image.

I was never in a school situation where someone said, “This is the way a photograph is supposed to look.” I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.

By confusing distinctions between what constitutes eroticism versus pornography versus beauty versus banality—that’s all one continuum. It is an interesting source, and I do feel that the most highly developed sensibility I have is sexual, as opposed to intellectual or emotional, and I think it’s a matter of understanding that and accepting that and not trying to alter myself.

I sometimes visualize myself as a bizarre guerrilla, investing in a kind of humorous warfare in which a series of minimal, direct, invented acts result in maximum extrinsic effect, but without consistent rationale.

Some of my enthusiasm for the [found] photograph was based on the fact that there was some residual illusion of reality in it always, no matter what I did to it.

I have the feeling that there are things happening that are really very interesting things, if we can somehow find the key that makes them visible.

I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

The photograph... is not a picture of something, but is an object about something.

The figure, because of its human, erotic, sensual, and psychological connections, remains my primary subject interest and is the vehicle for the formal content of the work.