Mark Heitner’s earliest artistic influences were from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his father occasionally took him on weekends to see European paintings.
He spent a summer doing clerical work for his grandfather at a firm on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He happened upon a street corner exhibit of Cartier-Bresson works while on a lunch break. He also made multiple visits to the Museum of Modern Art when Guernica was there.
He then attended prep school, where a classmate introduced him to portrait photography. He bought his first camera, a Pentax Spotmatic with earnings from his summer job. He stumbled across a collection of photography books in a local library, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and Richard Avedon. He photographed his classmates for the high school yearbook. Later he photographed classmates at Cornell University.
His brother-in-law encouraged him to shoot with medium format film, using a Pentax 6x7 camera. He developed the negatives and made comments on his contact sheets.
His photographing was interrupted at times by the birth of four children, and moves to Colorado and New Mexico. Many years passed without making photographs, during which time digital photography was invented.
He began shooting again at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens. Exhibits of Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Vivian Maier, and Gary Winogrand have been impactful. He entered photo contests at the suggestion of his artist-patients, to get his work into public viewing. His successes there led to this website.
