Richard Prince

Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy) 1989, Ektacolor print, 50 x 70 inches fgsd
“There wasn’t really a plan. I’ve never been included in any photography based survey, museum show, photo magazine. I’ve heard that Peter Galassi hates my work. That he would never acknowledge it in the photo department at MoMA. I think he’s wrong. I think my photo work is all about photography. But there was never an idea about where the work was going at the beginning when I started to re-photograph images. When you don’t have any training in a particular medium you can bring something to it that hasn’t been brung (sic). I “brung” the sheriff and I shot him. I killed photography. Maybe they hated that.. I always look for my name in Photography mags but I never see it. Maybe I should have “rescued” photography.” –Richard Prince from an on-going unpublished email interview with Brian Appel, Sept, 26th, 2005, www.artcritical.com

Richard Prince is an American artist best known for his re-photographed photograph Untitled (Cowboy), 1984. The original photograph was part of a marketing campaign for the “Marlboro Man”, a character recurring for many years in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes. His works have often been the subject of debates within the art world for both their obvious use of appropriation and for the numbers the fetch at auction. In fact, Untitled (Cowboy) was the first photograph to raise more than one million at auction when it was sold at Christie’s New York in 2005.
Prince has also created controversy by re-photographing four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times, and as with the art of Sherri Levine, anytime you are photographing photographs, controversy and dialogue concerning authorship and authenticity are bound to fight their way into the spotlight. Prince has also found himself in the center of many legal battles around photographic copyright issues.