Photographer Philip Heying lives in Matfield Green, Kansas. Born in 1959 in Kansas City, Missouri. Phillip learned the craft of black & white film and print development while in middle school. In 1983, he earned a BFA in painting from University of Kansas.

During his college time in Lawrence, Philip was introduced to William S. Burroughs and embarked on a friendship which lasted until Burroughsʼs death in 1997. Welcomed into the writer’s circle of friends--including Albert Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Timothy Leary--Philip found himself the beneficiary of singular artistic insight and guidance. During this time, his artistic focus shifted from painting to photography.

In 1985, eager for new experiences, Philip crossed the Atlantic on a coal freighter and made his way to Paris. He immediately became aware of the limitations of not speaking the language and eventually gained fluency in French. The experience of learning a new language and being immersed in a culture other than the one he grew up in had a profound effect on his photographic practice.

In late 1986, he returned to Kansas City and took work as a commercial photographer and printer and joined the Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography. Not long after that he sold prints of his work to serious collectors for the first time.

In summer 1987, William S. Burroughs asked him to collaborate on an art project. At Burroughs’ direction, Philip took pictures that Burroughs collaged into his paintings.

Back in Paris in 1988, Philip presented a selection of his prints to gallerist Agathe Gaillard and she gave him a show, his first solo exhibition, which opened in February 1989. Good sales and positive reviews of that show led to a six-month residency at the Cartier Foundation in Jouy-en-Josas outside Paris. At the end of the year, he sold five prints to the Bibliotheque Nationale. In May 1990 he had a second solo exhibition at La Societe Francaise de Photographie, and contributed prints to their archive.

Over the next seven years, based in Paris, Philip held solo exhibitions at Galerie Anita Neugebauer in Basel, Switzerland, and again with Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris. He established a robust commercial clientele, including the International Herald Tribune, Liberation, Le Monde, Conde Nast Publications, Art News, Art in America, and a number of advertising agencies.

In 1997 Philip returned to the U.S., settling in Brooklyn. He was hired as an assistant at the Irving Penn studio, where for four years he worked primarily on the final preparation of negatives for large-format platinum prints, and on print finishing and retouching.

By 2001, Philip was receiving commissions as a freelance editorial photographer, working for The New York Times Style Magazine, Details, BlackBook, GQ, Penthouse, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

After he left Penn studio, Philip would visit with Mr. Penn over the next seven years, continuing conversations about photography that began during his employment at the studio. In Spring 2003, he participated in Sylva, an international group show at Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery in New York.

For the next five years, Philip worked on sequencing a series of pictures, begun in 1990, that became a book project titled CODE, inspired by conversations with Albert Hoffman and William S. Burroughs, exploring unconventional possibilities within the phenomenology of photography. It was completed in 2008. April Watson, Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, contributed a critical text elucidating the purposes of this project.

To date, Philip has completed eleven books, with two currently in progress. This medium allows him to experiment with new forms of visual communication through photography.

In the fall of 2008, Philip returned to Kansas to be closer to family and to pursue a long-held idea for the series Unimproved Land in Northeast Kansas, a photographic survey of the energetic ecological processes visible in the Midwestern landscape in the absence of human intervention. The Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City exhibited the completed series in 2011. Works from this well-reviewed show sold to area collectors and the Microsoft Art Collection.

Between 2010 and late 2019, Philip taught three different curricula in photography and managed a complex studio and photo education lab for a department of around 200 students per semester at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. During that period he also completed a series of photographs titled Within a Two-Mile Radius for One Year. Prints from that series were acquired for the permanent collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Philip recently completed work on A Visual Archaeology of the Anthropocene from Eastern Kansas to the High Plains, a project addressing the extraordinary power and consequences of human influence on the ecology of his home region. The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence purchased prints from this series for their permanent collection.

Since the completion of that project, Philip has moved to the town of Matfield Green (population 49) in the center of the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie, to pursue a long-term project exploring the potent complexities of the culture and essential prairie environment there. In April of 2022 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this project.