Robert Heinecken

Robert Heinecken was an American artist, born in Denver of 1931 who grew up in Riverside, California. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at UCLA where he studied printmaking and photography. As an artist, he referred to himself as a “paraphotographer” for his photographic images made without a camera.

Heinecken is known for appropriating and re-processing images from magazines, products packaging or television. In the late 1960s, he also began cutting up popular magazines such as Time and Vogue and inserting sexual or pornographic images into them. He would then place his collage-publications back on newsstands in Los Angeles to be sold to unsuspecting buyers. In the 1980s, he created several series on American news television or exposing the light of a television set directly to paper to create what he called “videograms.”