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Soft Figure

Robert Heinecken American

Not on view

A quintessential Los Angeles artist of the radical 1960s, Robert Heinecken graduated in 1960 with a master’s degree in printmaking. Four years later, he founded the photography program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught for the next twenty-seven years. Ironically, he rarely used a camera to create his own images and instead appropriated pictures from magazines. This dreamy and erotic work from the beginning of his career effectively explores camera techniques often defined as "bad photography," such as incorrect exposure, shooting into the light, and motion blur. At first glance one might ask, is it a photograph documenting reality or a copy of a drawing? For Heinecken, this ambiguity is precisely where the beauty lies.

Soft Figure, Robert Heinecken (American, 1931–2006), Gelatin silver print

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