Lauded photographer dies at 89

Ken Heyman, a leading photographer who worked with Margaret Mead, shot scores of assignments for Life magazine, collaborated with President Lyndon B. Johnson and endlessly sought new, revelatory ways of seeing the world, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

His daughter Jennifer McCarthy confirmed his death.

Heyman first accompanied Mead, the noted cultural anthropologist, on a trip to Bali in 1957, and he took the photographs for “Family,” an acclaimed 1965 collaboration in which the two examined families around the world in images and text.

“The combination,” Jacob Deschin wrote in a review in The New York Times, “more integrated than is usual in word and picture associations, should make anthropology palatable for many who might never be inclined to pick up a book on the subject.”

The next year he collaborated with Johnson on “This America: A Portrait of a Nation,” a book intended to illustrate Johnson’s “Great Society” initiatives. Johnson wrote the text.

Those two books were among more than 40 that Heyman published, either on his own or in collaboration with writers. Some were whimsical, like a series of children’s books with Ann Morris that took a global look at particular subjects (“Bread, Bread, Bread,” “Hats, Hats, Hats”). Others documented the grown-up world, like “Pop Art” (1965) and “The Private World of Leonard Bernstein” (1968, with John Gruen).

“Ken Heyman seems to use his skill and the photographic process to allow other people, his subjects, to make their own pitch about themselves,” an essay about him in the book “U.S. Camera ‘62” said. “He doesn’t really take pictures of people and things (or, God forbid, grind out endless examples of his own cleverness). He photographs feelings and relationships.”

He would often do so from unexpected perspectives, a technique illustrated by “Hipshot: One-Handed, Auto-Focus Photographs by a Master Photographer,” a 1988 book of images shot with a cheap camera held at knee height, resting on the ground or otherwise positioned to capture an unusual perspective. Kelly Wise, in a review in The Boston Globe, called it “a book that almost hums with its own street sounds.”

Kenneth Louis Heyman was born on Oct. 6, 1930, in Manhattan to David and Ruth (Stein) Heyman. He first became interested in photography in high school, and once he enrolled at Columbia College he continued to pursue that passion, taking photographs for the campus newspaper, working late in the darkroom so often that he tended to sleep through his morning classes.

“I was put on scholastic probation,” he said in a 2012 video interview for the website What If It Really Works, “and during the Korean War those people were drafted.”

After two years in the Army, from 1952 to 1954, he returned to Columbia.