Richard Prince

Richard Prince started his career as a figure painter, but around 1975 he started to make collages using photographs and text. In 1977 he produced a series of four photographs of living rooms lifted from the New York Times. This act of rephotographing cast doubt on basic assumptions about authorship, the authenticity of photographic images, the ownership of public images, and the nature of invention. In the Jokes series, started in 1986, Prince chronicles America's sexual fantasies and frustrated desires through one-liners, stand-up comedy, and burlesque-like jokes. Revealing the darker side of American life and the pathology of Middle America, his work exposes several false distinctions: the presumed dichotomies between the copy and the original, the normal and the uncanny, public and private, fact and fiction. Prince's appropriated photograph Brooke Shields (Spiritual America) (1983) shows the ten-year-old actress standing in the bath, her androgynous child's body contradicted by her sophisticated, womanly attitude. The title of the work alludes to Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of the same name, which depicts the groin of a castrated horse. When this work was first shown in an exhibition organized by Prince himself, the image was at the center of a lawsuit between Shields' mother and the original photographer. Prince's controversial display of the photograph raises issues of voyeurism and commodification of images.