One obligation facing any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work for the Museum of Modern Art is to explain to the audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this museum’s Department of Photography as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto. […]
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I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and Robert Heinecken continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. They knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle. […] Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […] World Press Photo was founded in the Netherlands in 1955 — not coincidentally, the year in which Edward Steichen’s extravaganza, “The Family of Man,” made its debut as a traveling exhibit and a catalogue. That enormously influential show and book undoubtedly exerted a considerable influence on the way that the WPP exhibitions took form when they began. That influence can still be felt today; the individual images for the most part reiterate the classic tropes of that era, the show itself collects and sorts its contents into little more than a yearly variation on the Steichen model. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
14 Years On: R.I.P., J.F.K., Jr.
If you want to locate the exact time and place at which, by example, the right to privacy of the children of the rich and powerful was surrendered willingly by the trend-setting leader of the free world and his fashionable spouse, you need look no further than “the first hundred days” of the Kennedy Administration. […]