Feature - Heaton
grandfather is said to be the first American to enter Beijing’s Forbidden City.) His father, “Jack” R. Heaton, was also an adventurer who explored Tahiti in the 1920s, Brazil and the Amazon in the 1930s, and the Chilean Andes in the 1940s. During the same period Jack won three Olympic medals—two silver and a bronze—as a bobsledder and skeleton racer. That heritage is a mandate of sorts, but Heaton has surely lived up to it. After a stint at San Francisco’s Art Academy, he embarked on a three-year journey through Mexico, living in his Jeep and learning “fishy Spanish” working on a shark-fishing boat. Later he befriended followers of Maximón, a Mayan deity, and filmed their elaborate rituals. He accompanied the Dalai Lama to Russia. From 1977 onward he managed to compile an archive of 50,000 still images and 100 hours of film footage recording other extensive travels to Central America, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya, the Trobriand Islands, the U.S., France, and Peru. Heaton also built a jungle eco-retreat (Rancho Corozal) so remote it lacks electricity; he restored several important Spanish colonial buildings in La Antigua Guatemala, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; and he founded Atelier Xenacoj, a workshop of Kaqchikel Maya women
weavers who produce one-of-a-kind textiles using traditional techniques and vegetable dyes. Over the years the travel press took notice of Heaton’s exploits, lauding his expertise as a hotelier while dishing on his dashing demeanor. (One Daily Mail writer dubbed him “impossibly handsome.”) And despite his refusal to embrace the artist label, both the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and The Latin American Library at Tulane University mounted exhibitions of his breathtaking blackand-white photographic portraits of everyday life in Guatemala. (His work also resides in numerous prestigious university collections and private collections.) Ultimately, according to Heaton, it all boils down to exploring the world and the people in it: “Titles for me were not that important; it was what I was able to do. To sum it up, my life was spent trying to have a good life— not materialistically, but trying to have an interesting life where I could be an adventurer. Live in a beautiful house but go to the Ventura swap meet every Wednesday and chat with the people there. I think everybody’s interesting. For me, people at the Ventura swap meet are as interesting as the Lacandon Maya people I met in the jungle, because they’re people with stories.” • winter2021
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