Ken Heyman


In a chronology of his life that Ken Heyman wrote by hand, the first entry begins on January 10, 1954, the day he was discharged from the U.S. Army. Soon after, he was readmitted to Columbia University, where he took courses with such legendary figures in the social sciences as the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. Heyman records that photography interested him as a hobby at this time, but that he was serious about social work. That fall, he began to work at a settlement house, where he met Donald White, the leader of a Harlem street gang. Their relationship developed into a project for a book that Heyman worked on until White’s death in a Federal prison in 1963: Teenage Gang: the Imperial Knights of Harlem, with a photo essay—Heyman’s first-- and dialogue from interviews with Donald White. The book was never published, but this was the material that first captured the attention of Margaret Mead during a graduate seminar at Columbia. It launched a twenty-year friendship and collaboration between the photographer and anthropologist that lasted until Mead’s death in 1978 and resulted in two books, Family (Ridge Press, 1965) and World Enough (Little Brown, 1976).

After Teenage Gang was abandoned as a book, Donald White never directly appeared again among Heyman’s published or exhibited images, at least to my knowledge. But he has left two echoes in Heyman’s work—one faint, one more distinct. The first is a photograph from Teenage Gang in which an unidentified black male with his back to the camera confronts a screaming woman and a crowd of hostile white youths under a boardwalk. This is how Heyman has written about the picture: “Her screaming stopped everybody in their tracks for one angry moment, and I was able to get this picture. One second later, the black man was knocked unconscious by a flying coke bottle. As photojournalists we are trained to get this kind of action picture. But as you can see this . . . is not particularly journalistic but geared more towards emotional and intimate situations.” Indeed, the woman’s scream rivets the action dramatically. She seems to lock in place not only the faceless black man and the angry, moving crowd, but to create a caesura in flow of events where Heyman can “get in,” or as he writes, “to get this picture.” As viewers we are drawn in behind him, attentive but not individually involved, like the unseen spectators behind the woman and the crowd, mostly headless, massed on the boardwalk above. Heyman’s photograph is a veritable graph of looking, and a declaration of the photographic: to let a moment open up within the boundaries of a frame. It is no accident that Heyman has produced so many books, since his feeling for time is two-fold: the distillation of a moment, and the time-limits of an expedition or an assignment.

The second echo of the absent Donald White is a book called  Willie, that was published the year White died (Ridge Press, 1963, with text by Michael Mason). Willie a child of the streets, or rather of one street in Hell’s Kitchen where he would spend his day, is Donald White’s natural child, in fact— four years old, but charismatic and street-wise, vulnerable and nurtured by the inhabitants of street, framed by the environment of his confined world—the curb, the lot, hanging laundry, a visiting fire truck. On five separate occasions over the course of a month, Heyman visited Willie’s block and took photographs of him with the child’s acknowledgement, if not his constant consent. Across the pages of this beautiful little book, Willie ebulliently performs, plays, forgets the camera, or tries to hide from the intrusion of having his photograph taken, as if the little man inside him sensed that each time the shutter clicked something really was being taken from him—perhaps it was about his time or energy, surely it was about the expenditure of feeling. “We communicated, we didn’t converse,” Heyman noted on the dust jacket of his book. Indeed, Willie is the memento of a friendship—as photography often is—and much like Donald White, Heyman found in Willie the protagonist of a social narrative.

While he was still at Columbia, Heyman saw The Family of Man: “The greatest exhibition of all time,” the cover and title page of its catalogue proclaimed, “503 pictures from 68 countries—created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art. Prologue by Carl Sandburg.” Steichen’s exhibition was pivotal not only in popularizing photography, but in promoting it as a universal language, a sort of master narrative of mankind. In France, where the exhibition was translated as The Great Family of Man, the critic Roland Barthes offered another point of view in an essay anthologized in his book Mythologies (1957). “The myth of the human ‘condition’  rests on a very old mystification,” he wrote, “which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.” By this Barthes register his disagreement with the priority of nature over history, of an essential state that transcended contingencies of time and place.

In the light of Steichen’s landmark exhibition, which Heyman saw just as he was encountering the work of Mead and beginning to know her personally, and with Barthes’ vigorously dissent in mind, it is worth considering Family, the product of a seven-year collaboration that began when Heyman accompanied Mead on a field trip to a village called Bayung Gede in the highlands of Bali for a month during 1958. Steichen’s exhibition was designed to resemble a book layout, with photographs printed in various sizes. The catalogue recreates its impact. Each spread is thematic, reinforced by visual rhymes of gesture or expression. Each theme invariably illuminates an emotion, such as pleasure, fear, or as Barthes observed, momentous occasions of birth and death. They serve to cross cultures and eradicate differences in the name of a common condition that, one is to suppose, has always been and is everywhere the same.

In Family, Mead’s chapters are rigorously structured according to relationships of kinship (Mothers, Fathers, Families, Brothers, Sisters, and Grandparents); of association (Friends); and of human development (The Child Alone, Adolescents). The visual parallels organized across a spread or over a series of pages--for example, mothers bathing their children in Hong Kong, the former U.S.S.R., Puerto Rico, the U.S.A. and Nigeria, Brazil on pages 34-35-- are like questions that have been posed again and again by the same interlocutor. We might think of this as Mead’s inquiring voice, asking, for example, how do mothers care for their children? Heyman’s photographs respond differently each time the question is posed, according to the resources each mother has at hand and to the conventions and usages of each culture. Here are the descriptions of these images, captioned in a picture index at the beginning of the book: “The bath—with sea water in Hong Kong, where water is rationed; with warm water from a teakettle in Tashkent; under a hose in San Jose; in a tub in New York City; and in Nigeria with lots of soap and river water.” Tellingly, cultural difference informs the way each mother touches her child: does she stand above or squat beside her child? does she face or support her child from behind? does she stroke or play with her child? or approach the task briskly and with determination?

Eighteen years after their field work together in Bayung Gede, Heyman and Mead returned in 1976 in preparation for a second book, World Enough. Mead wanted to revisit the families she had known with a generation before. On his first day out, Heyman photographed a crowd of children, looking at his pictures from 1958. None of them had ever seen a photograph before. “This was Dr. Mead’s favorite picture,” Heyman recalled,  “She used it as a photomural covering the entrance to the Margaret Mead Hall in the American Museum of Natural History,” where she was a curator of ethnology from 1946 to 1969. Mead’s two visits to Bali with Heyman in 1958 and 1976 recapitulate her field work there two decades earlier with her husband and fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson. They published very little  from their field work but took many photographs of village life in Bayung Gede.[i] It would seem that for Mead, photography was not only a vital instrument of recording but of a way of seeing, of rendering observation concretely. It is revealing that in the photograph by Heyman of which she was so fond, the disturbance outside the frame that animates the crowd of children is photography itself.

The late 1960s were an especially productive time for Heyman. In addition to Family, he was commissioned to produce photo essays about Pop Art (with John Rublowsky, Basic Books, 1965), Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (This America, with text by Johnson, Ridge Press, 1966), and Leonard Bernstein (The Private World of Leonard Bernstein, with John Gruen, Ridge Press 1968). The photographs of Bernstein offer privileged, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the celebrated conductor. We see Bernstein, for example, shaving in his underwear in his New York bathroom, surrounded by other photographs, warily eyeing the camera in the mirror; or backstage, dressed in a tuxedo, a cigarette in his right hand, quickly but passionately pressing his lips to the cufflinks given to him by Serge Koussevitzky just before he goes onstage. And in what is surely the book’s most memorable spread, Heyman records a surprise visit by Charlie Chaplin to the Bernsteins’ rented villa in Ansedonia on the Italian. To Bernstein’s accompaniment, Chaplin improvises mock arias from the opera. Heyman’s book establishes a palpable intimacy with its subject; it is as if we have been admitted into a magic circle. This, of course, is a partly function of Bernstein’s extroversion. Like Willie or Donald White before him, Bernstein is a magnetic force, but unlike them he appears before the camera fully formed, the impresario of his own life. Heyman’s role may be like “wallpaper,” as he professes—present but in the background—nonetheless, he has uncanny gift for closeness, for friendships sealed by photography. Even a practiced introvert like Andy Warhol, opens up sweetly before Heyman’s lens in the book, Pop Art.

A different aspect of the times is revealed in Heyman’s last book of the 1960s, a collaboration with the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld is the antithesis of the big picture book; it is not so triumphal as Bernstein or This America, but idiosyncratic and anti-establishment, more in tune with the radical, participatory esthetic that we have come to associate with the sixties. This may have something to do Marshall McLuhan’s voice, which Carpenter acknowledges in the texts he has written, juxtaposed with images culled from Heyman’s photographs. One of my favorites is the first. It is a singularly enigmatic image, a sort of syncopated group portrait in a cemetery in which the figures, clustered or solitary, stand upon or beside grave stones, accompanied by the following oracular, telegraphic text, “Dislocations. Only connect; the rest is silence.” Indeed Heyman’s photograph is the very picture of dislocation. No collective focus here. Together, they scarcely constitute a group. What are they doing in the picture? what are they seeing? what has brought them together? Carpenter doesn’t offer any explanation, but for Heyman, it is another matter. He wants us to know. He informs us that this photograph was taken on the day John F. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. At first glance, the group almost seems to have been posed, or as Heyman remarked, what struck him was the way in which the people standing on the stones already looked like statues. Indeed, a common attention and an uncommon reserve binds them together. As we scan across the shallow space of the frame, it is like looking at a late 20th century bas relief. Seeing, as Carpenter argues, and Heyman continually shows us, is a condition that changes us each time we look.

Heyman’s handwritten chronology of his life abruptly breaks off in 1981, during a period of crisis when his photography had come to a virtual halt. This would change when Heyman began to use an automatic focus camera with a fixed, wide-angle lens that he learned to aim at arms length, usually at ground-level. “The pictures taken during those first months of experimenting made it clear that the horizon line was never where it should be,” he noted, that it was never level. In 1985, Aperture published a group of what Heyman calls “hipshot” photographs, a method he still practices, although he now  shoots in color. By choosing not to look through the view-finder and frame what he saw into a picture, Heyman ceded a certain control as a photographer but succeeded in reinventing himself as an artist. He reveled in getting closer to his subjects, “too close” as he says, to maintain journalistic distance or the niceties of the frame. The physicality of Heyman’s hipshots is intense: his subjects hover over, press down, or explode through the frame.

Margaret Mead once remarked rather astutely that Heyman photographs relationships. By this, she surely meant the relationships between people. As an anthropologist, this was what mattered to her. We might extend the coordinate of Mead’s formulation by adding that Heyman photographs the relationship between the photographer and his subject, between the subject and himself.


Neil Printz

May 2007