a sequence of four unique Polaroid Polacolor prints, comprising Jane Pauley, Joan Lunden, Diane Sawyer, and a Composite, each framed, an Innovation/Imagination exhibition label on the reverse, 1983 (4)

San Francisco, The Friends of Photography, Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography, May - J♛uly 1999, and traveling to 11 other venues through 2007 (see Appendix 1)

 

Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography (The Friends ♏of Photography, 1999🌊), pp. 84-5 (these prints)

Joan Lunden - There is a very thin border of paper tape running the width of the upper print edge.
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A fighter pilot who later trained as a printmaker, Robert Heinecken is one of the seminal artists of his generation working in photography's conceptual realm.  Heinecken's printmaking background, with its emphasis on handwork, gave him the freedom to see photographs not as inviolate objects, but rather as raw material to be cut, superimposed, altered, and collaged.  An influential teacher, Heinecken was a pioneer in the postmodernist techniques of appropriation, especially from magazines and advertising; the use of found photographs from a plethora of sources; and the combining of text and photographs as an artistic statement.  Heinecken's work in these genres began in the 1960s, long before Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and the rest of the 'Pictures Generation' arrived on the scene.  '[Heinecken's] conceptual advance quickly transcended the photography world,' Lynne Warren has written, 'and today it seems almost quaint to point out how radical Heinecken's methods were' (Robert Heinecken: Photographist, p. 15).  

The photographs offered here are from the artist's series of photographs made from television screens.  Like other forms of mass media whose cultural influence was pervasive, television inspired Heinecken to alter and combine images into a sharp comment on the medium. The earliest of these television photographs, called videograms by the artist, were made by placing film directly onto a television screen. The Ronald Reagan Inauguration series of 1981 (ibid., plates 74-77) is perhaps best known, with its blurry, ghost-like shapes and the characteristic blue coloration of l🐽ight emanating from the scr☂een.    

In 1983, Heineken was invited to use the 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera at The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and at the School of the 🌱Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is almost certain that the unique Polaroid images offered here were made directly from a television screen with one or both of these cameras; no other images in the Heinecken Archive duplicate these photographs.  The direct positive format of the Polaroid 20-by-24-inch prints gave Heinecken the opportunity to capture the screens' images in greater detail than the earlier videograms; the special quality of these Polaroid pictures, made with no intervening negatives, preserves something of the immediacy of the television moment.

Later, Heinecken would continue the television series with a 35mm camera, making negatives and multiple prints for his satirical Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman of 1984 (ibid., plates 78-82).  The unique Polaroids offered here are the prototypes for this series, both in technical approach and content.  Three of the present P♊olaroids document the faces of the top newswomen of the day, while the final image is a muddled composite of all of them.  It is a suite of images that comments🍷 upon the growing ubiquity of television and the bland homogeneity it promulgates. 

For two other unique Polaroid newswomen images by Heineck☂en, made with the 20🉐-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, please see Lot 194.

Sotheby's wishes to thank Luke🐻 Batten, Director of the Robert Heinecken Trust, for his generous response to questions regarding the Robert Heinecken material in this catalogue.