Erik Madigan Heck

Kristen Owen, MUSE

2014

Originally from Excelsior, Minnesota, Erik Madigan Heck is one of the youngest and most promising American fashion photographers of the contemporary art scene. In his relatively short career, the artist developed a personal way of looking at fashion, as Nathalie Herschdorfer underlines in her essay - Minimal and pure: Erik Madigan Heck fashion photographs. Heck’s photographs push the concept to new limits, creating imagery that goes beyond traditional fashion photography. Meticulously constructed and enhanced with bright colors, blurring the line between the clothes and the background, his images play with this idea of future silhouettes. His work is characterized by a clear and distinctive treatment of colors and patterns, which makes it unequivocal. In 2017, Heck published his first monograph with Thames & Hudson and Abrams Books titled Old Future. In his Old Future series, Madigan Heck explores the intersection of photography and painting as he borrows from and bends the genres of fashion photography, landscape painting and portraiture. Madigan Heck is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, TIME and more. His advertising clients include Sotheby's, Clinique, Nike and more. In 2013, he became one of the youngest photographers to receive the prestigious ICP Infinity Award, and in 2015, he was awarded the Art Directors Club’s Gold Medal and the AI-IP American Photography award for his Old Masters Portfolio, published by The New York Times Magazine. Heck is based in Connecticut and New York City.