Another Sort of Camera

From the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, Los Angeles based photographer Robert Heinecken created a myriad of magazine works that included the artist's self-produced "mongrel" magazines, various photomontages and photocollages, and other hybrid prints derived from mass-media imagery. This thesis contends that these magazine works constitute a particular strand of photographic neo-avant-gardism, a category of advanced artistic practice thus far underdeveloped in the scholarly literature. By synthesizing the discourse of historical and neo-avant-gardism with media-critical texts, I develop of framework to explain the radical moves inaugurated by Heinecken's work. Chapters two and three, which comprise the body of my argument, demonstrate how Heinecken folds the strategies of the historical avant-garde into the medium of photography. In so doing, he creates a form of photographic practice that interrogates the history of photography as it relates to America's burgeoning, Cold War consumer society. Through his magazine works, Heinecken seeks to interrupt the incessant flow of media temporality, to focus his viewers' attention on the structure of photographic meaning, and most provocatively, to upend the notion of photographic indexicality through an innovative substitution of apertures. To conclude, I outline a trajectory of radical photographic evolution that progressed through the twentieth century--a trajectory that moves from making photographs, to creating objects about things, and finally, to presenting pictures.