The New York Times has described the contemporary American artist Richard Prince, as ‘one of the most revered artists of his generation’. His work has met with huge critical acclaim and popular success but as with all of the most successful contemporary artists, Prince’s work has courted some controversy.
His breakthrough series Cowboys was created using a technique of re-photography; with the artist selecting existing imagery that appealed to him and re-photographing it, sometimes cropping out promotional text or adjusting and cropping the composition before presenting the new photograph in a fine art context. The original series, and ensuing explorations of other distinctly American groups and subcultures, including bikers and their girlfriends, launched Prince’s career. Yet, on occasion, ethical and legal disputes have arisen from photographers who feel their work has been unfairly used and profited upon by the artist.
With re-photography, the artist’s eye and his process of selection becomes the aesthetic action and Prince himself has described his process as similar to beach-combing or going into the studio and ‘bumping into things’, This sense of sifting through huge volumes of imagery and ideas to select a very specific few is a particular skill and way of working that the artist developed whilst working at Time Life’s cutting service, where he also gained a deep familiarity with advertising imagery. As an artistic practice, Prince started using re-photography in 1977, and at that time then disowned all his previous artistic work.
All artistic choices and processes are important, yet it seems especially valid to explore the meanings and suggestions of Prince’s selected imagery, as it is the selection rather than any creation that is his artistic labour. Cowboys was his breakthrough series, and the cowboy, in particular, is a distinctly American fantasy view of masculinity. By selecting them as his subject, Prince at once celebrates the fantasy and icon, while also exposing its unreality, particularly as many of his cowboy images are taken from Marlborough advertising campaigns, where the original images were taken by photographers hired by the company to create such fantasy imagery, and often featured posed models rather than real men living this lifestyle.
