After shooting around the world for publications such as
The New York Times,
New York Magazine,
Vogue and
British Vogue,
Elle Decor, and
Architectural Digest, and for clients including
Ralph Lauren,
Cartier,
American Express, and
Tiffany & Co. her successful career allowed her to close her commercial studio in 1999, to return to a more personal exploration of photography. She began
The Sleepers with the idea of experimenting with unconventional forms of portrait photography. Within three years she was offered her first one-person show of these works, which opened at the Edwynn Houk gallery in New York, in January 2003.
The Sleepers, a series of monumental toned black and white photographs of sleeping nudes, is a meditation on the mystical world of sleep and the emotional journey we travel in our unconscious state. Reviewing the exhibit
The New Yorker wrote that the work: "conjures thoughts of human fragility and impermanence even if the sleepers have become heroic sculptures rising from a deep slumber." Sei Swann published a monograph of
The Sleepers, with an essay inspired by the works, written by the playwright
John Guare, in January 2003. Heyert's obsession with sleep and the unconscious led her inevitably to photograph
The Travelers, a series of large-scale color post-mortem portraits. The photographs stirred discussion and controversy when they were first exhibited in New York. The New York Times, in a feature article about the works, described these photographs as a "peek beneath the surface at the vibrant, living face beneath the mask of death." Scalo Verlag published her book,
The Travelers, in March 2006. At the end of the year Photo-Eye Magazine named
The Travelers one of the best photography books of 2006. The 30 x 40 inch photographs have been widely exhibited internationally: at the
Musée de l'Élysée in
Lausanne, Switzerland; at the
Hayward Gallery in London; in Austria in
New Art/New York: Reflections of the Human Condition; and in a solo museum show at the Malmo Museer in Sweden. In May 2007, 18 life size prints of
The Travelers were exhibited on a small island in
Naarden, The Netherlands, accessible only through an ancient stone tunnel, as part of an exhibition entitled
In Memoriam. The works have also been the subject of television programs by ARD Kulturweltspiegel in Germany and by
TVE Spain, a
National Public Radio program, and feature articles in
Sueddeutsche Zeitung,
El Mundo, in the Swiss publications
Le Temps and
Femina, and
Vrij Nederland among others. Heyert's work has been extensively reviewed and discussed in leading international publications such as
The New York Times, the
Times of London,
Le Monde, and
Stern and in contemporary publications such as
The Drawbridge and
Dazed and
Confused. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Beinecke Library of Rare Books, and Manuscripts at
Yale as well as numerous private collections. Her most recent projects include
The Bound (2016), which explores the body as a site for experimentation and transformation, and
The Outsider (2017), a conceptual photography project shot in China. She is currently at work on
The Idol, a new series that explores religion and popular culture, and the ways society creates myths and false images about women. ==References==