The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS SURVEY THE FEMALE FORM
museum phers Avedon, Irving and all between cial tographer has the Fashion A moved often Inez younger art work Penn, including world: and Helmut crossed shows. and their working back photography Horst Vinoodh fashion gallery Photogra- and commer- Newton, over Richard P. in Horst forth pho- have that into and Heck’s been in same based, Design The tradition, featured grad Parsons fashion New Erik York in New work School Madigan spreads Times York- has of Harper’s magazines pear Magazine, altogether, Bazaar Vanity shrink that UK. or Fair move- disap- But and as even ment phers more of into fashion galleries sense; photogra- the makes art gallery tive market is a new, in a precari- alternaous Blown print up world. and isolated away from their original magazine context, Heck’s images on view at Jack- son Fine Art in his show “Old Future” are a vision of poreless, wrinkle-free, stray hair-absent perfec- tion, a beauty so skillfully manipulated it borders on abstraction.In works like “Three Colors,” a woman in a face-obscuring picture hat and white suit with red accents is set against an acid blue background. The image’s flat surface and hypervivid color give it an airless, manufactured look, like a vintage travel poster advertising a Riv- iera beach vacation. Though the majority of works in “Old Future” are shot in studios under con- trolled conditions, occasionally Heck pulls his mod- els out of the studio, plac ing them in nature against a backdrop of flowers or forest, though the airless, world-under-glass quality remains. Heck, whose own mother was a painter, approaches his photographs with a painterly eye, amping up the color to an almost cartoonish degree to give his photographs a surreal effect, his models partly graphic, partly human. Even as he’s ratcheting up the color, he is flatten- ing details and textures, offering up a final image that looks like something between an Alex Katz paint-ing and a Campbell's soup can label. His reds burn with the hellfire tints of a Max Fleischer devil, and his blues look like the chemical sapphire of a David Hock-ney swimming pool. Col-ors pulsate off Heck's pho-tographs' surfaces with an almost psychedelic effect. Heck often sets his mod-els against pitch black backgrounds, the better to emphasize what a fash-ion photographer is wont to highlight: gorgeous clothes from Gucci, Valentino and Etro that explode like pop-pies from the frame.
The work is pretty and striking, and probably in the context of the parade of youth, luxury and money in a fashion magazine con-text, genuinely arresting. But the photographs are probably less interesting in the context of an art gallery where his waxen-skin young men and raven-haired women are as uni-formly beautiful as a lac-quered porcelain vase. You can appreciate the work-manship even if you don't want to stand around look-ing at it for very long or find much swimming beneath the surface. Heck also tends to lean on a lexicon of certain gestures like a repeated pose, seen throughout "Old Future," in which his models turn away from the camera, denying us the rich reward of every por-trait: a glimpse of another human being. The device adds a frisson of mystery to his photographs, but also serves the fashion pho-tographer's ultimate mis-sinn of highlighting the hir- urious, richly patterned clothes above all.
Heck's work is paired with some saucy rendi-tions of the female body from renowned Hungarian-born photographer Andre Kertesz. Kertesz's black-and-white photos from the 1930s are a kind of surreal-ist eroticism very different from his iconic street pho-tography. Though Kertesz himself resisted working in fashion, in some sense Kertesz's work here — like Heck's — also does its part to turn the female body into a tantalizing abstrac-tion. Taken for the French magazine Le Sourire, Ker-tesz looks at the female body as it is reflected in a distorting, funhouse mir-ror, and the result is equal parts comedy and horror, with a touch of eros to spice the whole brew.