2005, "Richard Prince," Routledge

For The 20th Century Encyclopedia of Photography, 2006

Richard Prince's photographs are documentations of the widely available, shared subject matter of found printed images.  His daring re-presentations of popular, frequently recognizable photographs have provoked a re-consideration of authorship and photography. He is an important figure among both appropriation and conceptual photography movements of the mid to late 1970's in the United States.

Prince's interest in art began with painting but developed into a focus on photography.  In the early 1970's, he moved to New York and was employed in the tear sheets department of Time Life publications.  The job gave him access to thousands of printed images, which he re-photographed and presented as new artwork.  He slightly altered the cropping, lighting, and angle of the originals, escaping accusations of illegal reproduction and subtly hinting at the seduction and stereotypes of mass media.  As a result, he created works that are copies and yet that can simultaneously exist independently as original work.

During the 1970's, Prince used found images in collages, playing with juxtapositions. In 1977 for example, Prince took four pictures of commercial photographs of living rooms from The New York Times Magazine and presented them in a uniform line.  The re-presentation, (Untitled) Living Rooms, 1977, prompts the viewer to acknowledge the monotonous, frequently serialized repetition of mass media.  The work also references the reproduction potential inherent to the medium of photography.  Prince presents duplicate photographs of what appear to be duplicate living rooms, implying that the elements of modernity are mass-produced, even in the case of artwork.

Other early appropriation work by Prince includes his series of photographs of Marlboro advertisements, Cowboys (1980-84), for which he cropped out the text and logo of the popular images.  The result was a set of photographs that allude to both the consumer's memory of the highly visible cigarette advertisements and appeal to the unconscious collective memory of the iconic western cowboy. The fragmentary, almost elusive nature of the works makes Prince the appropriation cowboy of the photographic world as he exposes the way in which advertisers appropriate visual ideals to romanticize a product.

In 1983, Prince re-photographed an image of celebrity Brooke Shields.  The image is one of the actress as a child, nude with an oiled body, standing in a bathroom, gazing at the viewer.  Photographer Garry Gross, with the permission of the actress's agent and mother, had originally taken the image privately but it had become available to the public through a legal debate over the rights to the photograph.  Prince photographed a copy of the image and then re-presented it in a gallery space in Manhattan.  The gallery was titled Spiritual America and Prince had constructed it specifically for his own use.  He positioned his photograph in the front of the gallery and hired an attendant who was told nothing about the work or its origin.  Prince had generated more interest in the scandal over the original photograph and a secondary interest in the potential for covert reproduction in the world of mass media.  He also created a new interest in himself and his photographs by making a spectacle of the gallery re-presentation.

The photographs that Prince selected for much of his work in the early eighties are of figures of rebellion, of pioneering masculinity, and of seductive femininity. He stole the images of bikers, punk rockers, Catherine Denuve, alternative youths, Superman, and criminals, among others, most of whom suit the delinquent gesture of appropriation.  The subjects embody the fierce and the bold, the fearless, and the utterly romantic, all of the qualities that Prince himself exhibits by selecting printed imagery and stealing it for his own much more glamorous re-presentations.

Prince's stolen images are re-presented in provocative ways that frequently provide some sort fantastic power void in the original.  Take for example, Super Heavy Santa, 1986, for which he juxtaposes images of Superman, heavy metal musicians and Santa Claus.  There seem to be no common ground between the subjects, but Prince's close juxtaposition proves they each share a use of costumes.  In Criminals and Celebrities, 1986, he puts together images of outlaws and famous people.  The juxtaposition evidences the commonality - both criminals and celebrities hide their faces from the cameras - some for shame and others for privacy.  The combinations in these works also reference the inconsistent jumbling of mass media, which places all images on the same plane.  In mass media, such as magazines, Superman, heavy metalists, Santa Claus, criminals, celebrities, living rooms, and cowboys, can all appear side by side.

Prince's arbitrary juxtapositioning however, is made in clean and uniform in grid like patters that imply the overarching order of the printed world.  He is careful to arrange his individual images in lines, boxes or rows.  His system mimics the shape of columns in magazines.  He applies the mindset of a graphic designer or layout artist.  A great example of this is Velvet Beach, 1984-5.  In this work, Prince presents twelve boxed images of waves.  Each image shows the wave with white water in the action of breaking, at a tumultuous climactic and chaotic moment.  The images are arranged however to form a uniform rectangle with consistent white space between them.  The look is like a magazine layout.

At the turn of the century, Prince published his writing and began to create paintings of text and images.  He pairs a joke, which is an appropriated textual social property, with cartoon like iconography and abstract gestural painting.   The jokes are sometimes incomplete or at their climactic moment.  They are often crass or culturally outdated.  The works, though aesthetically different than his early photography, share a common intention to evoke familiarity and shock.  The artist also continued to re-purpose existing photographs, including those given to him by celebrities in the series, "All the best."