“Ken Heyman joins the company of all those artists who have made all of us more human. Walking the streets of the city, free of the cataracts of indifference, you can sometimes see what you least expected: yourself.” – Pete Hamill
This exhibition celebrates Ken Heyman's 50-year career as one of America 's leading photojournalists. Heyman's first major photo essays were made in collaboration with Margaret Mead, who had been his professor at Columbia in the 1950s. Despite the generational divide, Heyman and Mead were kindred spirits, bound by a lifelong interest in the generalized notion of family. They ultimately coauthored two books,
Family in 1965 and
World Enough in 1976. Heyman has had one-man shows at MoMA and the ICP; more recently his collaboration with Mead was honored with a major exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. All told, he has published over 40 books and has photographed in over 60 countries, primarily for LIFE Magazine, but also for the Magnum and Rapho Guillumette photo agencies and the USIA. His 1965 publication
Pop Art (recently reissued in portfolio form by Gagosian Gallery)
captures Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and company during their first flush of exposure and is a classic of its genre.
Our exhibition ranges over Heyman's entire career, starting with his gritty New York street photographs of the late 1950s,
© All photographs copyright by Ken Heyman