Ken Heyman

NEW YORK—Ken Heyman’s remarkable career as a photographer and photojournalist took off in the mid-1950s when, the superstar anthropologist Margaret Mead, his former professor, invited him to accompany her on a study trip to Bali. They subsequently made The Family (1965), one of the most influential photoanthropology books ever published.

Heyman also worked extensively for Life magazine, and he has made some of the iconic images of the last century, both on assignment and beyond. His portraits of Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, and Ernest Hemingway are particularly celebrated, but it is often his arresting and eloquent photographs of anonymous people that are most telling. He is known for inventing the “hipshot” method of photography—using a fixed-lens camera without raising it to his eye to take spontaneous, often clandestine shots, a technique that has had an enormous influence on street photography and that Heyman says works best in urban areas where people are just “hanging out.”

His most recent New York exhibition, a survey of his entire career called “Humanity,” is at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Chelsea until February 23. He recently took the time to chat with ARTINFO about his work.

Ken, how did you come to work with Margaret Mead?

I was a terrible student. I now realize that’s mostly because I’m just a visual person, so if I had to memorize history or Latin, I’d fail. I only got into Columbia because my father was connected to the place, but when I got there I wanted to work with the most famous professor, and that was Margaret Mead.

In the first course I took with her she said to us, “I can’t grade all your papers, but if any of you have any other abilities, like photography, then you can include them in your paper.” At that time I was doing social work in Harlem with a group of 7- and 8-year-olds and I included pictures of that with the paper. In the last week of the course she called me into her office. I got my first A, and she asked me to take a graduate anthropology course, “Field Methods and Techniques,” the next term.

A year later, after I graduated, she asked me, “Ken, would you like to go to Bali with me? Just the two of us.” It was so monumental it didn’t register. The next morning I woke up and I phoned her, “Dr. Mead, did you ask me to go to Bali with you?” She said, “Yes, goddammit. And you didn’t answer. I thought you didn’t want to go!”

A few years after that first trip we did a book together called Family. It was enormously important for my young career because it established me. It was a Literary Guild book of the month and it sold 260,000 copies.

What do you think she saw in your work?

I think she could see that I could not only take pictures, I saw. She once described me to someone with the words, “Ken photographs relationships.”

I’m actually more interested in seeing and perception than I am in photography. I’m not interested in photography or cameras.

What did you learn from her?

That you can affect the world. She certainly did.

How many of the photographs in this exhibition were done on professional assignment?

Very few. But the importance of the assignments was that they’d pay for first-class tickets. For example, I got an assignment to go Australia, and I changed the tickets [to economy class] and went on around the world. On that trip to Australia I went to Johannesburg, because I wanted to see what apartheid looked like.

Tell me about the photograph of Andy Warhol.

It’s from the first book on Pop Art. When the editor contacted me, I was a photojournalist and I really didn’t know anything about Pop Art, but I knew Andy. Years before, I had gone to a party, and at the table I was sitting at was the woman who would later become my wife. She was a soap opera star—she had the lead in As the World Turns—and Andy was sitting there, just thrilled, asking her questions about what was going to happen on the show the next week. The next day, the woman who had thrown the party called me and asked if I had “any work for that strange starving artist at your table.” I said, “Why don’t you send him over?”

So Andy came over, and he said, “I could paint a room.” I had an extra bathroom, and the next day he came to paint it. When I got home at about 6:00, he had painted a tree going up the wall, and there he was putting leaves on the tree. He had a rubber stamp of leaves. He had another stamp of cherries, and he put cherries on the tree. And he had a butterfly stamp and put butterflies around the tree, and he swabbed them with orange or yellow or red paint, in his style of not really painting but just giving it a splash. He painted two calico cats on the wall, and one on the toilet seat. A couple of years later we left the building, and eventually it burned down. Later it occurred to me that I should have kept the toilet seat!