Lessons in Posing Subjects

Lessons in Posing Subjects reproduces, complete and for the first time, the series Robert Heinecken assembled between 1981 and 1982 from photographs he found in mail-order clothing catalogues.

The spiral-bound, 56-page volume pairs each appropriated image of a model with a deadpan instructional caption, mimicking the language of posing guides while exposing the poses' underlying artifice and address to a consuming eye. Published by Triangle Books with WIELS in Brussels in 2014, in an edition of 1,000 copies, the book accompanied an exhibition of the same title curated by Devrim Bayar, who also contributed the accompanying text; the show later traveled to Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) worked mostly without a camera, instead cutting, rephotographing, and recombining images already circulating in magazines, catalogues, and advertising, describing his practice as that of a 'paraphotographer.' Lessons in Posing Subjects belongs to a broader body of appropriation work from the late 1970s and early 1980s, made alongside his Polaroid-based projects, that treats commercial photography's conventions of femininity as material to be dismantled from within.