Robert Heinecken (1931 – May 19, 2006) was an American artist who referred to himself as a "paraphotographer" because he so often made photographic images without a camera.
I was never in a school situation where someone said, This is the way a photograph is supposed to look. I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.
Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
An aspect of the work has to do with altering the literalcultural meaning of existing public images by making minimal changes and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.
The photograph. . . is not a picture of something, but is an object about something.
There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
Some of my enthusiasm for the [found] photograph was based on the fact that there was some residual illusion of reality in it always, no matter what I did to it.
There is a great difference between shooting a photograph and making a photograph.
I am interested in the relationships and play between an unfamiliar pictureobject context and the familiar photographic image.
I have the feeling that there are things happening that are really very interesting things, if we can somehow find the key that makes them visible.