Philip Heying's Slides of Burroughs' Paintings (1986)

Lawrence, Kansas: Philip Heying (photographic slides), 1986.
11.25" x 9" (plastic sheet); 2" x 2" (slides, each), fifteen slides in a plastic protective sheet.

Fifteen slides taken of William S. Burroughs' early paintings, taken by Philip Heying — photographer and friend of Burroughs — in collaboration with William S. Burroughs at his studio in Lawrence, Kansas in 1986.

As noted by Philip Heying in his 2025 essay "A Do Easy Portrait of William Burroughs," Philip describes the context in which these were taken:

“[William] started asking me about ways to photographically merge images from one painting onto another. A few weeks after that, James [Grauerholz] called me to ask if I could help William use photography to make visual analogies to cut up recordings…

"When I met with William, he asked me to shoot macro detail slides of some of his favorite parts of pieces he was working on. ‘Do you see that fox, right there, coming out of those bushes?’ he would ask, pointing at a swirl of color on wood, I could nearly always see exactly what he described. It was amazing to me. ‘Look, there, that’s a 1934 Duesenberg. Do you see it? Coming out toward you?’ I did see it –it was right there! - and I photographed it for him…

"The next step was coming over to his house with the slides and a slide projector to project the macro images onto other paintings and see what emerged. For this we both smoked a lot of weed, getting very high. We would darken the house and move the projector and the paintings around until… something… seemed to take form. Then I would photograph that with negative film for making color prints. Then he collaged the resulting prints back into other works.”

These slides were acquired during a visit to Philip Heying's rural Kansas home, and the annotations on the sheet are in my hand.