At a time where many have fled cities in search of seclusion amid the verdant reassures of the natural world and become family photographers out of cheer necessity, their options limited by the strictures of social isolation, American artist and fashion photographer Erik Madigan Heck has been years ahead of the curve.
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The Garden, Heck’s four-gallery exhibition and forthcoming book, is an ongoing body of work depicting the artist’s wife and two sons set amid a landscape that evokes the myth and majesty of childhood fairytales. Describing himself as “a painter who uses a camera,” Heck transforms the original photographs into storybook scenes through the meticulous process of adding luminous layers of color and exquisite patterns while simultaneously flattening the images by removing shadows and depth of field.
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Like Edouard Vuillard, the French Impressionist painter he admired as a child, Heck transforms the picture plane into a dreamscape where reality and fantasy become one. Where he once altered the photograph in the darkroom, Heck now does it digitally to produce the same effect: a photograph that transcends notions of the documentary nature of the medium.
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“The original photographs I take don’t really resemble the end results,” Heck reveals. “When everything is so immediate, there’s a real luxury in being able to put something aside, come back to it. There are photographs taken years ago and I’ll go through the archive and pull something out and then start reworking it. Sometimes I will spend weeks where I will do a little color, put it aside, and come back to it, which is basically the same way you would approach painting on a canvas. Time with the piece erases the moment when you took the picture first in because it’s no longer about that day you took the photograph.”
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