©Philip Heying, A doe traversing a woodpile in heavy snow near Banks Creek – 25 January 2023 4:32am

Philip Heying and I can’t remember exactly when we met, but we think it may have been with the Society for Contemporary Photography in Kansas City. Later on, in 2013 he curated an exhibition and helped me scan and print some photos for that show. I was impressed with his craftsmanship, knowledge of working with a file in Photoshop, and meticulous attention to the smallest detail that would improve a photograph. I learned a lot. I am still impressed with how he works and the images he creates. The first work I saw of his was the 9/11 series he did of people fleeing Manhattan on foot over the Williamsburg Bridge. More recently, Philip has created photographs with extraordinary beauty in the Kansas Flint Hills which I saw in his solo exhibition in 2023 in Kansas City. I asked Philip to share that work with Lenscratch, and to tell us about the importance of the prairie ecosystem.

©Philip Heying, Desiccated broom weed in a brook in the North Branch Verdigris River watershed – 16 April 2020 9:15am

A Survey of Elemental Gratitude

On the afternoon of May 29th, 2022 at 4:29pm, I found a small ancient stone knife on the ground, and it changed my life.

It is an artifact of the people who lived in the region around my home in Matfield Green, Kansas, along the South Fork Cottonwood River and its tributaries in the grassland of the Flint Hills, thousands of years ago. I’ve dreamed of finding such a vestige of history since I was a boy. In a hot wind, in the middle of a recently tilled soybean field, at the age of 63 years, it happened. This potent experience of being the first person to hold the stone knife since some individual lost it millennia ago has led me to try to understand the world from which it came and the world we are headed into.

Our current era is called the Anthropocene because humanity is now the predominant force of change on the planet. Without the space of the Great Plains, our imaginations would be deprived of a potent metaphor for possibility, abundance, and resilience. To spend time living in a grassland is to become subliminally connected to the central alchemical idea: As above, so below. I believe that this remnant of a once oceanic-scale ecosystem is rich with knowledge and metaphor that might, if persuasively and broadly communicated, allow new relationships, new systems of living, to be imaginable. While the pictures I make may serve as a kind of document of what exists here now, I especially hope they will be vehicles for envisioning possibilities for the future.

©Philip Heying, The Milky Way with a meteor and three jet navigation light trails seen from open range west of Matfield Green – 2 September 2022 10:13pm

©Philip Heying, Moonrise and a flock of migrating waterfowl over open range near the headwaters of the South Fork Cottonwood River – 22 May 2024 8:31pm

©Philip Heying, Mammatus clouds ahead of an approaching thunderstorm over open range west of Matfield Green – 19 May 2024 7:51pm

©Philip Heying, Open range west of Matfield Station, -7 degrees Fahrenheit, with strong northerly winds – 10 February 2021 3:14pm

Photographer Philip Heying, born in 1959 in Kansas City, Missouri, developed a passion for photography during middle school, mastering black and white film and print development. After earning a BFA in painting in 1983 from the University of Kansas, he transitioned uniquely to photography after having seen the work of Lewis Baltz and Robert Frank during his senior year.

In Lawrence, Kansas, he formed a significant friendship with writer William S. Burroughs, influencing his shift to photography. In 1985, Philip travelled to Paris and ended up residing there, on and off until 1997, for a total of ten years. The experience of being a foreigner fundamentally informed his photographic practice.

Back in Kansas City for a year in 1986, he began a career in commercial photography, joining the Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography.

Collaborating with Burroughs on a series of collaged paintings in 1987, he exhibited his own work in Paris in 1988 with a solo show at Galerie Agathe Gaillard, leading to a residency at the Cartier Foundation and sales in France. Since that show he has consistently exhibited his work internationally.

Returning to the U.S. in 1997, he worked as an assistant for Irving Penn for four years, eventually undertaking his own freelance editorial photography career based in Brooklyn by 2001. He maintained friendship with Penn until his passing in 2009. During these years, he also worked closely with Joel Meyerowitz making guide prints for Meyerowitz’s book “Tuscany: Inside the Light” in 2003.

In 2010, he completed the book project “CODE” and a series titled Unimproved Land Northeast Kansas. From 2010 to 2019, Philip taught at Johnson County Community College and had examples of his work acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

In 2019, he finished “A Visual Archaeology of the Anthropocene,” addressing human influence on the environment. He then moved to Matfield Green, Kansas. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, focusing on his photography of the tallgrass prairie. His current project, “A Survey of Elemental Gratitude,” explores grassland ecology’s enduring vitality and the hope it might imply for the future.

Instagram: @philip_heying

©Philip Heying, The supermoon rising seen from the south pasture on the Dobbins Ranch – 11 August 2022 8:50pm

Philip has also not only written statements about his various projects, but also the processes and philosophies that inform his work, and the encounters that have shaped his experience in life. He has written about having worked for and become friends with Irving Penn and William Burroughs. The experience of having visited Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated inspired him to research the history of its development and write an essay about his experience of standing on the spot where humanity entered the nuclear age. In an effort to express his lifelong commitment to the medium of photography, he spent five years working on his essay bout the phenomenology of photography, titled Thoughts on Photography and Consciousness.

©Philip Heying, A temperate spring feeding the headwaters of the South Fork Cottonwood River in winter, -2 degrees Fahrenheit (2) – 26 December 2022 4:24pm

©Philip Heying, A heron rousing after bathing in Thurman Creek on the Rowe farm southeast of Matfield Green – 28 March 2023 8:44pm

©Philip Heying, Zack Bell’s goat Molly reclining on the bank of the South Fork Cottonwood River – 3 July 2020 8:15am

©Philip Heying, A column of smoke from a prescribed burn along G Road south of Clements – 31 March 2021 2:36pm

©Philip Heying, An archaic flint knife found on the Rowe farmstead near the confluence of Thurman Creek and the South Fork Cottonwood River – 29 May 2022 4:34pm

Website: https://philipheying.com
Instagram: @philip_heying