Dare anyone ask?

What does an eight-year old girl have in common with a frog, or a praying mantis with members of a groundbreaking ceremony? Among other things, they suggest that being recognized is tantamount to being appreciated or captured, and that self-presentation, within the quirks of self-preservation, has risks and rewards. This is one of several paradoxes Philip Heying's photographs evoke about the nature of perception and consciousness.

Returning to his native Kansas after a long absence, Heying finds the commonplace riddled with mystery, and deserving of attention. His apparent strategy, or deliberate non-strategy, is to dismiss nothing out of hand and engage in an extended dialogue with the photographic canvas, the subject and himself. Pledging allegiance to no particular genre, the artist demonstrates suppleness and intellectual rigor. Unpredictably, Heying's photographs are unsentimental or evocative, raw or transcendently beautiful.

The title of the artist's book "SWEETHEART, IS EVERYTHING O.K?" poses a question asked mostly by inattentive lovers. A rudimentary form of this question may have occurred to one of his subjects, a praying mantis, reacting to its close-up with a tactical cock of its head. Is the photographer the only one asking the question? Who is recognizing whom? Is the insect threatening? Is it beautiful? Why did the photographer spend an hour following the insect around? Why didn't the insect feel threatened and fly away? Is this funny or grim? Another paradox.

In the course of rediscovering the surroundings where he grew up, he confronted evidence suggesting upheaval. Perhaps his observations are biased by his experience, while living in Brooklyn, of having watched the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers both on television and out his living room window. A photograph of several score empty shell casings littering a county road may be an unusual aberration or it may be a portent of impending violence. A sign in front of a drive-through liquor store that reads "I LIKE MY WHISKEY OLD AND WOMEN YOUNG" could be a joke, or a revelation of a new low in acceptable civic behavior. Is the installation of an F-14 Tomcat fighter-bomber beside an idyllic picnic table at a highway rest stop supposed to be comforting, or a concession to the morbid fascination of technology designed to dominate by means of extreme homicidal violence? At what cost do we listen to, or ignore, blatant information and subtle messages? How do we live with the dissonance of scorched ground or poisoned river against a beautiful, pale-blue Kansas sky?

Individual photographs on opposing pages of the book often resemble a dream narrative. Facts trade places with imagination. On one page, we see a lizard in the artist's hand. Its body is half-hidden and half-revealed. On the opposing page, a small car with a related patina is corralled in someone's backyard. Surely, the artist did not intend for this viewer to release the lizard and grasp the car as if a toy. Yet, it is one of multiple scenarios present in this diptych and a fractal universe. Old memories mingle with the photos' temporal specificity. Subjects shape-shift. The photograph remains silent, a tentative description of worlds separated more by limited ideas than by facts.

In another diptych, a young Coffeyville family in front of their house seems sad and heroic. On the opposite page, Heying presents a provocative close-up of an erect thumb. Each photo stands strong alone: a moment precisely acknowledged, a frame seamlessly constructed. Both raise questions of identity, sexuality and spatial possession that feel at once unlikely but perfectly natural. As with many discoveries, an accidental connection is recognized by its brilliance. The act of recognition, sometimes requiring a lifetime of preparation, is equally brilliant. Heying's understated palette and meticulous formal rigor have the stealth of a long distance runner...unpretentious, strong and far-reaching.

Dare anyone ask, except tongue in cheek, "SWEETHEART, IS EVERYTHING O.K?" Why must questioning be heartfelt? What about this business of "everything", does it exclude anything? What is "O.K."? A measure of the state of things or a frame of mind capable of asking or appreciating? For the artist, scientist and life traveler, the answers may remain provisional but still offer clues to the secret of these photographs and an awakened mind.


Douglas Koch