Heinecken in Retrospect

This is what life was like around Bob Heinecken. In 1974 I escaped my family and went to the Yosemite “Nude in the Landscape” workshop where Heinecken was one of the participating faculty. He had been my teacher for ten months at UCLA and I was entirely hooked on photography. Everyone brought extremely casual clothing to wear for those few days and I also brought a bundle of props to use in shooting.

One night a group of us decided to go to the elegant, up-scale Ahwahnee Hotel for dinner. The problem was the Ahwahnee had a dress code, which required skirts or pant suits for women and a sport coat and tie for men. I got by with jeans and a borrowed coordinating jeans jacket, but Heinecken had no coat and no tie. I gave him a long black opaque thigh-high stocking to use as a necktie, which was ever so chick, sexy, and so like Heinecken. We were drinking, playing, and laughing and it was all about ‘fooling’ the hotel and flaunting their rules. Upon arrival Bob donned one of the restaurant’s lending coats and sported my black stocking around his neck. Of course the coat was too big and the sleeves were quite low on his hands. It was great fun and emblematic of his charisma and lack of self-consciousness. He relished visually transforming himself and playing a role.

He brought out the imagination in everyone who knew him and he gave them the permission to be unique, to be outrageous, and above all, to be playful. He was the center of the fine art photography world at that time; everyone would gather around him at openings as he ‘held court’ in a corner somewhere. He has been and remains the greatest influence on my work and on my creative life. It was through him and Robert Fichter that I met my husband David Pann. He changed the direction of my life from the day I met him in 1973 to the present. I loved him.