Director, Glenn Lowry: Hello, I'm Glenn Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art. Welcome to Robert Heinecken Object Matter. This is the first New York retrospective of photography-based works that Heinecken made between the early 1960s and the 1990s. As you'll see, Heinecken rebelled against all the conventions of photography. The artist, speaking in 1988.
Artist, Robert Heinecken: I don't really think of myself as a photographer in the classic sense. Rather, I use the term para-photographer, in the same sense that a paramedic or a paralegal person need only know enough about that field to keep someone out of trouble until the real guys show up. That's kind of the way I see it.
Glenn Lowry: You'll hear more from Robert Heinecken on this tour, as well as from the exhibition's curators. Here's Eva Respini.
Curator, Eva Respini: I think the most important thing for me about Heinecken is what a pioneer he was in so many different ways. The way in which he was investigating what images mean in an image-saturated world to me seems utterly contemporary, yet he was very much of his time.
Glenn Lowry: Drew Sawyer.
Curator, Drew Sawyer: Heinecken in some ways, saw himself more as a documentarian: documenting the role of mass media in the construction of our daily experience and our identities, whether they be war photography, pornography, images of consumer goods. He saw these as all readily available for him to elucidate.
Glenn Lowry: MoMA Audio+ is sponsored by Bloomberg.