Lessons in Posing Subjects

Lessons in Posing Subjects takes the stock gestures of commercial photography apart, one deadpan caption at a time.

Between 1981 and 1982, Robert Heinecken rephotographed models and families from mail-order catalogues onto Polaroid SX-70 film, then wrote his own sober, faux-instructional texts beneath each image, describing invented rules of posture and expression as though transcribing a professional manual. This book reproduces the series' 41 plates in full for the first time, co-published by Triangle Books and WIELS to accompany the exhibition of the same title, the artist's first solo show in the UK. It is a spiral-bound softcover of 56 pages, with an essay by curator Devrim Bayar, in an edition of 1000.

Heinecken (1931-2006) called himself a "paraphotographer," someone who examined photographic meaning while rarely touching a camera, working instead with found and appropriated commercial imagery across collage, offset lithography and Polaroid. Lessons in Posing Subjects sits alongside related bodies of work from the same period as some of his most direct engagements with advertising's grammar of gesture.