Decryption

We know what we know, we see what we see. Do these operations function in parallel, or do they intersect? Though there remains some credence to the adage, "seeing is believing" (or, more cynically, "believing is seeing"), photographs that purport to record the world offer few, if any, assurances that one act relies upon the other for meaning. We derive interpretations and draw conclusions based upon our subjective experiences. We weave our culture, upbringing, and education into our understanding of the world. This, in turn, shapes our perceptions. Cognition is recognition, until someone or something upends our assumptions. The most interesting pictures, however -the ones that hold our attention, for whatever rhyme or reason- have the capacity to rupture our presumptions, and disorient, such that we are left having to redraw our cognitive maps, often without having a sense of where we stand within the larger topography.

Artists who work with photography's inherent contradictions know this. They are able dismantlers, adept at shuffling even the most mundane images into new communicative structures. They show us new ways to look at and perceive the world, and indeed, how we understand (or think we understand) the way photographs describe it to us. Philip Heying's CODE operates from this premise. CODE functions as a system of pictures: photographs serve as surrogates for words, emotions, thoughts, and experiences that are recognizable but not fully understood. No singular visual strategy unites the images, beyond their documentary-style aesthetic. (Heying staunchly avoids raucous Photoshop trickery or staged tableaux.) Titles are spare, and largely descriptive, adding only a modicum of clarity regarding subject matter. Indeed, flipping through the book's pages feels like listening to a story told in a foreign language in which the viewer/listener is competent but not fluent.

Though the individual relevance of each photograph is personal, and thus to some extent, impenetrable, Heying's image selection and arrangement elevates the pictures to something beyond mere solipsism. The 96 pictures resonate in aggregate, offering up a visual labyrinth that winds its way through imagery that is by turns banal, intimate, detached, mysterious, absurdist, and humane. CODE is structured such that it raises questions of consciousness and the nature of human perception as bases for understanding photographic imagery. It is best understood as offering clues rather than conclusions; paths, rather than passwords.

The book's edit is meticulous, guided by Heying's intuitive sensitivity to certain formal affinities, compositional strategies, and recurring subjects. We wander through landscapes of the living and the dead. Several images feature passageways: fluorescent-lit corridors, hallways, doorways in empty rooms. Others suggest obstruction, or trammeled views: brick walls, women seen from behind, or with faces obscured by hair. Mediated vision runs as a recurrent theme: televised pictures of political figures, fogged
windows, subjects visible only as reflections, or as seen through a blurry veil of snowflakes or raindrops. Often, Heying's juxtapositions prompt reckonings between "reality" and simulacrum: street views next to scale models, a museum period room adjacent to a taxidermied deer, Hollywood film sets next to actual buildings.

The book's first half focuses on particularly lifeless subjects, punctuated by moments of unnerving peculiarity: a white horse, eyeball aglow, against an ink-black backdrop; a trumpet player lying on his back in an empty, concrete lot; a 15-year-old Czech fashion model looking warily into the camera as she stands in a living room; a naked man crouched doglike on all fours in an empty room, looking out a small grate in the wall. In images such as these, something curious, or even unsettling, seems to be happening, suggesting interrupted narratives to which we have no access beyond the photographs themselves.

The book is cleaved in the center by two similar views of a street corner in Paris. Each image is itself bifurcated, compositionally, by a vertical element (the edge of a window or door) and taken from a vantage point such that the actual subjects appear on one side of the frame, and their store-window reflections appear in the other side of the frame. In the first image, the traffic signal is green; in the second, the street light is red. These images crystallize the confusion between reality and its reflections -it is nearly impossible to figure out where Heying might have been standing to take these two pictures- and in a sense, they operate as metaphors for the dual role photographs perform throughout CODE, as both descriptions and reflections of the world we inhabit. As situated in CODE's center, this pairing also serves to disrupt the notion of linearity that tends to guide our experience of reading a book, from start to finish. Indeed, throughout CODE, we stop, we go, we go back, then stop, looping back and forth between pictures whose significance is ever-shifting.

This instability is both enervating and vexing: it is as though we find Ariadne's thread,only to lose it a few images later. The images in the book's second half are more heavily populated by human subjects: fathers with children, young women, people in cartoonish costumes, among others. Some, such as the portrait William Burroughs and a gashed jack o' lantern, have deep personal relevance for Heying. (Burroughs was a friend, and one of Heying's greatest intellectual influences.) Two of the book's last three images invite Biblical comparisons: one features a view of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the next a young nude female model, standing stiffly in the Yucatan Jungle. Are we meant to associate these pictures with the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Garden of Eden? Or are they simply photographs that describe some livestock on a dusty, winding road, and a wan looking female model, her pudenda shaved and exposed amongst the fauna? The way we understand or feel about these images depends entirely upon our frames of reference.

CODE begins with a high-key picture of a cheap cheeseburger and ends with a TV screen grab of scrambled cable porn (The Spice Channel). These bookends (pictures of cheap food and commodified sexual frustration) are tethered by string of pictures that, ultimately, make as much sense as we want them to. In this way, the labyrinth is Heying's alone to navigate. As William Burroughs wrote: "There are keeps in this labyrinth which only those who live there know, for the labyrinth patterns are built into
the soul. Anyone with different maze patterns could never find his way."

In another sense, however, a specter hovers in the background of CODE. Four photographs, taken from a similar vantage point in Heying's Brooklyn apartment, and at different points in time, feature in their backgrounds the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (or the space they once occupied). Two of these images appear in the book's first half: one taken in winter, after a snowstorm has blanketed the block, and the other during warmer months, when an ice cream truck has stopped to serve customers. These two images, placed one after the other, convey a sense of well-being derived from the close observation of one's daily surroundings. The simple pleasures of this mundane activity are violently disrupted when we next encounter this street view, well into the book's second half. Here, we see the Towers smoldering in the immediate wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The fourth picture, which immediately follows the third, reveals only a haze of distant smoke where the structures once stood. Heying provides no commentary, just description, then continues with his final sequence. We move on through the last pages with a new sense of trepidation, and the unavoidable sense that this place-and our world-has irrevocably changed. Heying's images, so perfectly placed in CODE, bring to mind precisely what the events of 9/11 ripped from us: the broader sense of security and assurance derived from life "as usual." As we watched the Twin Towers smolder and fall, either through our own apartment windows (as in Heying's case) or the mediated imagery of television and the Internet, our sense of who we are and what we thought we knew fundamentally changed. It shattered our country's illusions of itself. This unsteady terrain, in both literal and symbolic terms, is where we find ourselves currently searching for meaning. What better medium than photography to both clarify and confuse our present state.

-April M. Watson

Curator, Photography
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art