Are You Rea is a portfolio of 24 photographic prints Robert Heinecken made by placing pages from popular magazines on photographic paper and exposing them to light. The resulting prints register both the front and back of the pages, blending them into a single image. This print features the truncated text “Are You Rea[. . .]” above two overlapping images of women, one modeling a bra, the other seated in a modern interior. Using source material from advertising, television, and pornography for much of his work, Heinecken critiques the manipulative intent behind such imagery. As he put it, the images “do not represent firsthand experiences, but are related to the perhaps more socially important manufactured experiences which are being created daily by the mass media."
Additional text from Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016
