Studies, #55, 1970

Trained as a print-maker, Robert Heinecken was attracted to photography for its “residual illusion of reality.” Around 1964, Heinecken embarked on his most ambitious project to date, a portfolio of twenty-five photograms entitled Are You Rea, hitching his notion of photographic overlay to chance juxtapositions found in contemporary magazines. Like the Surrealists, whom he admired, Heinecken was interested in gestalt—self-organized pictorial forms and circumstances that fused disparate objects, ideas or images into novel associations and meanings. Not surprisingly, he added to his portfolio an excerpt from André Breton’s 1932 book Les Vases Communicants [The Communicating Vessels], which programmatically stated Heinecken’s core belief, “that everything, in effect is an image [...], capable of standing for absolutely anything.”
Heinecken created the Are You Rea images by passing light onto photographic paper through the pages of an illustrated magazine instead of a negative. The resulting prints are negative, because the pages Heinecken used were naturally positive. They show both sides of the magazine page at the same time, creating unexpected juxtapositions that exposed the subliminal workings of modern mass media. Heinecken interpreted these pages “as social documents of certain co-existent words and images, locked by chance into that piece of paper—that content which very much reflects the false idealization of American goals and ideas of the 1960s...” The project took nearly four years, as Heinecken created hundreds of images and ultimately selected only twenty-five for inclusion in Are You Rea.