Amy Heller. Between Image and Object

Photography, Process, and Materiality in Contemporary Art Practice

Amy Heller’s work unfolds between photography, photographic process, printmaking, object-making, and installation. Her work often begins with a photograph, but what happens to the image afterward is never predetermined. It may be reassembled, multiplied, mirrored, combined with another image, transferred onto fabric, divided into layers, illuminated, transformed into an object, or enlarged to mural scale. Heller describes herself not simply as a photographer but as a “lens-based artist,” and characterizes her artistic path as a search for “a medium that has not been invented yet.”[1] This is more than a statement about artistic classification. The way her work evolves genuinely unsettles the boundary between photography and other forms of image-making.

For the study of historical photographic processes in contemporary practice, Heller is particularly interesting because she does not treat an older technique as an end in itself. Cyanotype, like analog photography, digital imaging, or printmaking, becomes one stage in a larger process of making and remaking the image. Its significance lies not only in the appearance of the final work, but also in what the process makes possible, what it leaves open to chance, and what further decisions it sets in motion.

From Technical Precision to “Happy Accidents”

Heller’s turn toward historical and alternative photographic processes initially had an almost reactive character. During her graduate studies at George Washington University, photography began to feel too technical and too precise. In response, she turned to Polaroid, pinhole photography, cyanotype, and Van Dyke Brown. She describes this shift as an “antidote” and a form of rebellion against photography based on excessive control.[2] What attracted her was the immediacy of these processes, their historical character, and the possibility of reaching a result that could not be fully predicted.

This is where one of the key ideas in her practice emerges: “happy accidents.” For Heller, an unexpected result is not simply a technical mistake. It can become the starting point for further investigation and may even lead to a new way of working.[3] Yet she does not advocate abandoning control altogether. A process may be highly precise while still leaving room for an unforeseen outcome.

This relationship between control and chance is more significant than a simple opposition between analog and digital imagery. Heller describes digital photography as more mechanical, precise, and cold, summing up this distinction in the phrase: “A pixel is a pixel.”[4] This does not mean that she rejects digital imaging. In her later work, digital tools become central to the further development of her photographs. The difference lies rather in the kind of experience the process offers and in the extent to which material properties participate in the making of the work.

Process Over Product

Heller speaks explicitly of “process over product” and adds that “the journey is key.”[5] These two phrases encapsulate an important principle of her practice. A finished work does not necessarily close the history of an image. A photograph may be revisited immediately or many years later; it may become the material for another work and then undergo further changes.[6]

This also changes the meaning of the original photograph. It is not simply a matter of losing its status as an original, but of keeping the image available for renewed activation. A photograph can be scanned, digitally reworked, combined with other photographs, printed, transferred onto fabric, divided into layers, or incorporated into a spatial construction. Each successive stage retains traces of what came before while altering the image’s function.

Heller’s work is therefore better understood as a process of transformation than simply as a crossing of media. The photograph becomes material that can be revisited, reconfigured, and placed in new relationships. Photography is one stage in the process rather than necessarily its final form.

Movement and Time

One of the most important sources of this approach is Heller’s longstanding interest in movement. She has been connected to dance and physical movement since an early age, while in the history of photography she has been particularly drawn to Étienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins.[7] Marey was initially the strongest influence on Heller’s work. Muybridge was also an important influence through his photographic studies of movement and their characteristic recording of successive phases of motion. For Heller, these historical approaches demonstrated how photography could register phenomena that the eye cannot perceive in quite the same way.

Marey was therefore not simply one historical reference among many. Heller describes him as the decisive early influence on her artistic development and continues to regard him as her muse. She later experimented with moving-film stroboscopy, building on an established photographic technique and gradually developing her own approach to it. Professor Andrew Davidhazy of the Rochester Institute of Technology was an important influence on this work, and Heller interviewed him for her graduate thesis.[8] As she explains, she experimented with the technique and made it her own through new discoveries along the way. In this process, a model moved in front of the camera while Heller simultaneously wound the film past an open shutter, and stroboscopic flashes recorded successive phases of movement on the same photographic material.[9] Here time is not simply the subject of the image. It becomes part of its visual structure.

Significantly, one of the important effects emerged by accident. A camera malfunction produced multiple exposures. Rather than discarding the result, Heller began to explore how similar effects could be reproduced deliberately while still preserving the possibility of unexpected outcomes.[10] From this experience developed her interest in the “passage of time,” abstraction, and “seeing the unseen” — the possibility of making visible something that cannot normally be perceived directly.[11]

Movement is therefore more than a recurring subject in Heller’s practice. It becomes a way of organizing the image. Rather than presenting a single position, the photograph can register relationships between positions and retain the trace of an event unfolding over time.

From Photography to Repetition and Reconfiguration

Heller’s Time/Motion Study Multiples series extends this investigation from the recording of movement to the subsequent reworking of the photographic image. The word “Multiple” appears in the titles of works that mark successive transformations of an earlier photograph rather than referring to a separate photographic technique or category.

The progression from Arms Up to Arms Up Multiple and then to Arms Up II Multiple makes this process particularly clear. The first work is a single panoramic analog photograph. The second is a digital collage or composite derived from that image, while the third pushes the original photograph further toward abstraction. What changes from one work to the next is not simply the number of images, but the status of the original photograph itself: first a photographic record, then material for digital recomposition, and finally the basis for a more abstract image.[12]

This sequence helps clarify the role of repetition in Heller’s work. A photographic element may be mirrored, reversed, repeated, or combined with other versions of itself within a modular structure. Photography remains the basic unit of composition, but the resulting image is more than the sum of its repeated elements.

Santos Hands Multiple demonstrates this particularly clearly. The work began as a cyanotype photograph on fabric depicting a Santos — a religious object in the form of a hand sculpture. That earlier photographic image was later transformed through digital repetition, mirroring, and inversion, producing an elaborate structure with an almost ornamental character.[13] In another context, such a procedure might lead toward abstraction. In Heller’s work, however, the repeated forms retain their relationship to the photographed object and its history.

Digital tools also alter the spatial possibilities of the image. Heller notes that digital technology has enabled her to work on a dramatically larger scale, including Santos Hands Multiple, presented as a 30 × 40-foot digital mural.[14] Digital technology is therefore not merely an instrument of correction or simulation. It allows the image to be repeated, reorganized, and expanded beyond the scale normally associated with a photographic work. This is an important shift. In Heller’s work, analog photographs and digital manipulation do not occupy opposing positions. The analog image provides material for further operations, while the digital environment opens new possibilities for repetition, recombination, and scale. The passage from one environment to another becomes part of the work itself.

Analog and Digital as a Single Process

Heller’s practice does not establish a simple opposition between analog and digital. The two can function as successive stages within the same process. An image begins as a photographic record, is reworked digitally, and may later return to physical form through printing, fabric, or object-making.

Heller is explicit about her own ambivalence. On the one hand, she emphasizes the importance of the physical historical process, authenticity, and the “hand of the artist.” On the other, she accepts digital simulation of historical techniques when that is what a particular project requires.[15] She even describes herself as a “walking contradiction.”[16] Rather than resolving this tension, her practice makes productive use of it. Different technologies can cooperate because their purpose is not to preserve medium purity but to develop the image. Digital technology, in this sense, does not represent a break with photographic history. It can become a means of reactivating historical material in new ways. What was once recorded or made in an analog environment can re-enter a digital one and become available for further transformation.

Cyanotype, Fabric, and Light

A second major route through Heller’s work leads from cyanotype into materials outside the conventions of the photographic print. The historical cyanotype process, introduced by John Herschel in 1842, is based on a direct relationship between the image and the sensitized material.[17] In Heller’s practice, that relationship is extended: the support is not merely a neutral surface but participates in the construction of the image.

The cyanotype works shown in the context of Exposure: Beneath the Layers should be distinguished from Heller’s Still Lives series. At that time, the works were described as LED, or backlit, mixed-media cyanotypes on silk rather than as Still Lives.[18] The sea-themed works visible in the museum installation photograph of the 2022 exhibition Out of the Blue are titled Sea/Me.[19]

What matters here is that the layers are not simply added to the photograph. Heller describes the layers, light, and translucent materials as “breathing” together and as all belonging to the image.[20] The work is therefore constructed not only through what the photograph depicts but also through relationships among its physical components. In Heller’s earlier LED mixed-media cyanotypes on silk, light acquires a significance beyond its technical function. In her description of the project, she associates light with truth, revelation, and understanding.[21] The physical construction of the work thus becomes part of its meaning. Transparency, overlapping layers, and illumination are not merely formal effects; they shape the way the image is encountered and interpreted.

From Image to Object

The transition from image to object becomes particularly clear in Heller’s Still Lives series. These works began as cyanotype photographs on fabric depicting classical sculptures that Heller photographed in museums and galleries. She subsequently began using these photographic images in three-dimensional sculptures.[22] Here a photographic record does not remain confined to the surface on which it was first produced but becomes material within a new spatial form.

In her later cyanotype sculptures, Heller extends this process further. In the Stuck series, pieces of fabric bearing cyanotype images are attached to a torso with acupuncture needles, which she associates with the experience of getting “un/stuck.” The objects may also be placed on motorized bases, introducing actual movement into the work.[23]

Movement thus returns to the construction of the image. It is no longer movement recorded by the camera; it becomes the movement of an object occupying space. This transition is crucial to understanding Heller’s practice. The photograph is not simply transferred from paper onto sculpture. What changes is the context in which the image exists. The viewer is no longer looking only at a surface, but at an arrangement of materials, layers, light, and space. The object can be viewed from different angles, and when it moves, its appearance changes over time. Photography, cyanotype, body, material, and movement consequently begin to operate as parts of a single system.

Body, Object, and “Stream of Consciousness”

The human body, particularly the female body, is one of the recurring subjects in Heller’s work. She identifies an autobiographical dimension to this interest while also emphasizing the formal possibilities the body offers for constructing images through overlapping forms, fragmentation, and abstraction.[24]

A similar logic appears in her work with objects. Hands, toys, trees, plants, and everyday objects may be removed from their ordinary contexts, repeated, or combined with other images. The aim is not to create a catalogue of objects but to use them as material for further development.

Heller describes the making of an image as a kind of “stream of consciousness” and “waking dream.”[25] The image develops through successive associations, decisions, and acts of selection. The process begins “in my head” — with imagining, looking, and dreaming — and then leads to a choice of process, which in turn influences the further development of the image.[26]

The mechanism can therefore be understood as a sequence: imagination → choice of process → result → chance → selection → next decision. What matters is that chance does not eliminate control. It changes its character. Heller does not control every outcome; rather, she establishes conditions in which different outcomes can emerge and then selects among them.[27]

The History of Photography as Active Material

In Heller’s practice, photographic history does not function primarily as a collection of old techniques to be faithfully reconstructed. It becomes material for making contemporary images. Her interest in Marey and Muybridge leads to new approaches to the photography of movement; cyanotype extends beyond the conventional paper print; analog photographs can be reactivated through digital collage.[28]

This makes it useful to distinguish between a historical technique and the historical function of that technique. Heller preserves some of the properties of an earlier process while changing the circumstances in which it operates. Cyanotype may be made on fabric, become part of a layered image, or be integrated into a spatial object. The historical character of the process remains present, but it no longer determines the final form of the work.

This approach also corresponds to the broader activities of ArtSynergies, a group interested in relationships between digital imaging, printmaking, and traditional and experimental photographic processes.[29] The 2015 exhibition Exposure: Beneath the Layers documented practices positioned between digital photography, alternative processes, printmaking, collage, and object-making.[30]

The point, then, is not a return to the past. A historical process is brought into a new technological and artistic context. Its continuity lies not in preserving its original function but in preserving its capacity to act.

“Being and Becoming”

The most concise expression of Heller’s attitude toward the image appears in her response to the question of when a photograph ceases to be a photograph. She does not identify such a boundary. Instead, she says that a photograph is initially a photograph and then “morphs into something more.” She compares this process to the birth of a star and describes the image as something that is constantly “being and becoming.”[31]

This phrase can be taken as a key to her practice. An image is simultaneously what it is at a given moment and what it may still become. A photograph can be repeated, mirrored, divided into layers, transferred onto another material, combined with an object, illuminated, set in motion, or digitally rescaled. None of these stages necessarily has to be final.

From this perspective, transformation is not a loss of photographic identity. It is a way of extending it. The image retains traces of its earlier forms while changing its function and the way it is encountered.

Photography can therefore be understood as a process of transmission. The image moves between different material and technological states: from recording to print, from print to collage, from analog to digital, from surface to fabric, from fabric to object. Each stage preserves something of what came before while opening new possibilities.

This is precisely what makes Heller’s work significant for the study of historical photographic processes in contemporary art. It demonstrates that continuity of technique does not have to mean continuity of function. A historical process can survive as a material or procedural property and then be activated within an environment that its nineteenth-century inventor could never have anticipated.

A photograph does not disappear when it ceases to be a conventional print. It continues in another form. It can remain an image while simultaneously becoming material, object, spatial structure, or large-scale digital work. In Heller’s practice, this capacity to move between forms is one of its defining characteristics.

“Being and becoming” is therefore more than a poetic metaphor. It offers a precise description of a photographic image that remains open to further development. Heller is not simply searching for one definitive form of photography. She is exploring what happens when an image is allowed to move beyond the form in which it first appeared.

Her practice ultimately brings us to one of the central questions of contemporary photography: not only how an image is made, but what it may become afterward.

Notes

1. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 11.

2. Ibid., Q. 1.

3. Ibid., Q. 1 and Q. 8; Serena Depero, “Amy Heller,” Conversations with Artists, December 27, 2025.

4. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 2.

5. Ibid., Q. 3.

6. Ibid., Q. 3.

7. Ibid., Q. 6; Amy Heller, Time/Motion Study Multiples, artist statement and work documentation.

8. Amy Heller, correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński, September 2026.

9. Ibid.; Serena Depero, “Amy Heller,” Conversations with Artists, December 27, 2025.

10. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 8; Serena Depero, “Amy Heller,” Conversations with Artists, December 27, 2025.

11. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 6.

12. Amy Heller, correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński, September 2026.

13. Ibid.

14. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 8; GBH, “Community Canvas: Santos Hands Multiple by Amy Heller,” February 19, 2026.

15. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 10.

16. Ibid.

17. John Frederick William Herschel, “On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours, and on Some New Photographic Processes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 132 (1842): 182–214.

18. Amy Heller, correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński, September 2026.

19. Ibid.

20. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 5.

21. Amy Heller, correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński, September 2026.

22. Amy Heller, “Still Lives,” in Exposure: Beneath the Layers, ArtSynergies, Cotuit Center for the Arts, 2015, pp. 5–6; Amy Heller, Cyanotype Sculpture, artist documentation.

23. Amy Heller, correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński, September 2026; Amy Heller, Cyanotype Sculpture, artist documentation.

24. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 7.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., Q. 9.

27. Ibid., Q. 8.

28. Amy Heller, Time/Motion Study Multiples, artist statement and work documentation; Serena Depero, “Amy Heller,” Conversations with Artists, December 27, 2025; Amy Heller, Cyanotype Sculpture, artist documentation.

29. ArtSynergies, “About,” ArtSynergies.

30. ArtSynergies, Exposure: Beneath the Layers, Cotuit Center for the Arts, 2015.

31. Amy Heller, responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński, 2026, Q. 12.

Bibliography and Sources

Primary Sources

Heller, Amy. “Still Lives.” In Exposure: Beneath the Layers. ArtSynergies, Cotuit Center for the Arts, 2015, pp. 5–6.

Heller, Amy. Cyanotype Sculpture. Artist documentation.

Heller, Amy. Time/Motion Study Multiples. Artist statement and work documentation.

Heller, Amy. Responses to questions by Grzegorz Gorczyński. 2026.

Heller, Amy. Personal correspondence with Grzegorz Gorczyński. September 2026.

Documentation and Sources on the Artist’s Practice

ArtSynergies. Exposure: Beneath the Layers. Cotuit Center for the Arts, 2015.

ArtSynergies. “About.” ArtSynergies.

Depero, Serena. “Amy Heller.” Conversations with Artists, December 27, 2025. Conversations with Artists

Fabbri, Malin. “Cyanotypes in the Shape of 3D Sculptures.” AlternativePhotography.com, January 28, 2024. alternativephotography.com

GBH. “Community Canvas: Santos Hands Multiple by Amy Heller.” February 19, 2026.

Heller, Amy. Cyanotype Sculpture. Artist website. Amy Heller

Heller, Amy. Time/Motion Study Multiples. Tokyo International Foto Awards, 2025. tokyofotoawards.jp

Historical Source

Herschel, John Frederick William. “On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours, and on Some New Photographic Processes.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 132 (1842): 182–214.