Robert Heinecken: Wore Khakis. SIGNED LIMITED EDITION Photobook, Only 20 Copies
Item History & Price
Robert Heinecken: Wore Khakis.
Robert Heinecken and Nazraeli Press, 1999 (never published).
Extremely rare edition of 20 hand-cut copies, signed "Heinecken, " numbered by hand, and stamped "FIRST PROOF" on the title page. CONDITION UPDATE: Please note that the lower right corner of the clamshell lid now has a light bump (see updated photos).The book is bound by a white, twin-loop wire and is contained in a khaki cloth-covered clamshell box. 60 pp., 56 hand-cut plates. ...9¼ × 11¾ inches.Wore Khakis epitomizes Robert Heinecken's unparalleled combination of ingenuity, wit, subversiveness, and technical skill. The book features imagery from The Gap's famous 1993 advertising campaign, which paired archival photographs of various celebrities wearing khaki pants (i.e., Amelia Earhart, Muhammad Ali, Truman Capote, Steve McQueen), with a simple, declarative statement: "______ wore khakis."
Heinecken assembled a sequence of these ads for each of the book's pages, and then—by hand—cut out shapes to reveal parts of the next page(s) to create new, multi-layered images with more and more complex available readings. These glimpses of subsequent image fragments recall Heinecken's photograms in Are You Rea and the Recto/Verso series, except here they're three dimensional. Heinecken also employed this extra dimension in his Revised Magazines, such as Time magazine's 1989 "150 Years of Photography" issue.
But (as if that dismantling wasn't amazingly smart enough), Heinecken scrambled the images and their "wore khakis" texts. For example, opposite a leaping, khaki-clad Truman Capote—whose shirt appears to be emblazoned with Ernest Hemingway and his cat—, Heinecken placed the text "Humphrey Davis, Jr. wore khakis." Indeed, Humphrey Bogart and Sammy Davis, Jr. each appear elsewhere in the book, as do the namesakes of a "Marlene Ginsberg" and other characters.
As his did throughout his career, in Wore Khakis Heinecken shattered the illusory integrity of the images and texts and literally cut through their intended messages, their superficiality—even their materiality—to create a sublime object that somehow defies thoughtless consumption and appeals to our desires, and simultaneously makes us laugh even as it demands curiosity and critical engagement.
"Armed with only an X-Acto knife and stacks of GAP ads torn from everyday magazines, Heinecken hunkered down in a cramped little studio over a two-car garage in the Hollywood Hills and single-handedly turned a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on its ear." — David Pagel, excerpted from "The Gaps in the Ads, " his essay in Wore Khakis
This is perhaps the only copy of this superb edition available for purchase.
Provenance available upon request.
10% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to the Alzheimer's Association.
Robert Heinecken and Nazraeli Press, 1999 (never published).
Extremely rare edition of 20 hand-cut copies, signed "Heinecken, " numbered by hand, and stamped "FIRST PROOF" on the title page. CONDITION UPDATE: Please note that the lower right corner of the clamshell lid now has a light bump (see updated photos).The book is bound by a white, twin-loop wire and is contained in a khaki cloth-covered clamshell box. 60 pp., 56 hand-cut plates. ...9¼ × 11¾ inches.Wore Khakis epitomizes Robert Heinecken's unparalleled combination of ingenuity, wit, subversiveness, and technical skill. The book features imagery from The Gap's famous 1993 advertising campaign, which paired archival photographs of various celebrities wearing khaki pants (i.e., Amelia Earhart, Muhammad Ali, Truman Capote, Steve McQueen), with a simple, declarative statement: "______ wore khakis."
Heinecken assembled a sequence of these ads for each of the book's pages, and then—by hand—cut out shapes to reveal parts of the next page(s) to create new, multi-layered images with more and more complex available readings. These glimpses of subsequent image fragments recall Heinecken's photograms in Are You Rea and the Recto/Verso series, except here they're three dimensional. Heinecken also employed this extra dimension in his Revised Magazines, such as Time magazine's 1989 "150 Years of Photography" issue.
But (as if that dismantling wasn't amazingly smart enough), Heinecken scrambled the images and their "wore khakis" texts. For example, opposite a leaping, khaki-clad Truman Capote—whose shirt appears to be emblazoned with Ernest Hemingway and his cat—, Heinecken placed the text "Humphrey Davis, Jr. wore khakis." Indeed, Humphrey Bogart and Sammy Davis, Jr. each appear elsewhere in the book, as do the namesakes of a "Marlene Ginsberg" and other characters.
As his did throughout his career, in Wore Khakis Heinecken shattered the illusory integrity of the images and texts and literally cut through their intended messages, their superficiality—even their materiality—to create a sublime object that somehow defies thoughtless consumption and appeals to our desires, and simultaneously makes us laugh even as it demands curiosity and critical engagement.
"Armed with only an X-Acto knife and stacks of GAP ads torn from everyday magazines, Heinecken hunkered down in a cramped little studio over a two-car garage in the Hollywood Hills and single-handedly turned a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on its ear." — David Pagel, excerpted from "The Gaps in the Ads, " his essay in Wore Khakis
This is perhaps the only copy of this superb edition available for purchase.
Provenance available upon request.
10% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to the Alzheimer's Association.
