Erik Madigan Heck

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.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.