1. Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal zone, grew up outside of Boston, and attended art school in Maine.
He moved to New York in 1973 and worked at Time Life in the tear sheet department. His job was to clip the articles written by the staff writers. And at the end of the day, he noticed that what he was left with was a stack of ads.

2. Untitled (living rooms), 1977
Studying them, he discovered certain patterns that repeated across ads – much like Roland Barthes’ observation that the “text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations.” Not perhaps even then an entirely new realization but what he did next was fairly radical. He rephotographed these advertising images and exhibited them as his own.
The impact of this work can’t be underestimated. In the early 1980s, the New York Times critic Andy Grundberg described Prince as one of the most influential artists in New York’s downtown art scene.
Richard Prince: Untitled (living rooms), This is his first appropriation and is composed of four ads from the New York Times Magazine.
Untitled (living rooms), 1977

3. Untitled (four single men), 1977
Grundberg talks about the rephotographs as a kind of dissection of what he calls “the syntax of advertising”).
At the same time, these pictures challenge the idea of originality, which has been a hallmark of Western art since the Renaissance. In this, they are seen as definitive postmodern works. In Grundberg’s words, they “’deconstruct’ or lay bare the very premises of modern art.” That is the ideas of originality and authorship.
Richard Prince: Untitled (four single men), 1977.
Untitled (four single men), 1977

4. Untitled (four women looking in the same direction), 1977
Prince himself has said of this work:
“Rephotography is a technique for stealing (pirating) already existing images, simulating rather than copying them, "managing" rather than quoting them–re-producing their effect and look as naturally as they had been produced when they first appeared. A resemblance more than a reproduction, a rephotograph is essentially an appropriation of what's already real about an existing image and an attempt to add on or additionalize this reality onto something more real, a virtuoso real–a reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn't have any chances of being real.”
Untitled (four women looking in the same direction), 1977

5. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 7, 1977
Early on, Prince was associated with the postmodernist artists of the 1970s and 80s—people like Cindy Sherman …
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still, 1978
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 7, 1977

6. Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1979

7. David Levinthal, from the Hitler Moves East series, 1975
David Levinthal: From the Hitler Moves East series, among others.
All these people were, as Grundberg puts it “sticking a pin in the balloon of art photography,” by suggesting that every picture that could be taken has already been taken—that we’ve somehow exhausted the supply of possible images in the world.
Again, Richard Prince: “His own desires had very little to do with what came from himself because what he put out (at least in part) had already been out. His way to make it new was make it again, and making it again was enough for him.”
David Levinthal, from the Hitler Moves East series, 1975

8. Prince’s work in this vein continued into 1984
Prince’s work in this vein continued into Probably the best-known of these is the Cowboy series. In the early 1980s, he began rephotographing Marlboro cigarette ads. The ads, which drew on the iconic image of the cowboy, themselves became iconic. They were everywhere—in magazines, on billboards, on television. The Marlboro Man was so iconic, in fact, that eventually Philip Morris dropped direct references to the cigarettes in this campaign.

9. So, by invoking this iconic rugged individual who symbolized adventure and self-reliance, Philip Morris attached these classic American frontier values to … cigarettes.
Again, Richard Prince: “The pictures I went after, ‘stole,’ were too good to be true. They were about wishful thinking, public pictures that happen to appear in the advertising sections of mass-market magazines, pictures not associated with an author...It was their look I was interested in. I wanted to re-present the closest thing to the real thing.”

10. Recently, Jim Krantz, the photographer who took this image and the one previous, visited Prince’s retrospective at the Whitney—which featured this image in its promotional materials—and said, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.” He gave an interview to the Times in which he said he wasn’t planning to file a lawsuit but wanted people to understand that there were other people involved in these making these images.

11. The image on the right sold at auction in 2005 for $1,248,000.

12. Today, it’s the Cowboys pictures that are most frequently reproduced and thus best-known. But in 1983, he became notorious for appropriating a nude photograph of Brooke Sheilds, at the age of 10, that had been taken by a commercial photographer by the name of Garry Gross.
This one landed Prince in some legal trouble. The original had been sold to a company that that planned to sell a limited edition of 1,000 posters selling for $1,000 each. Prince decided to make his appropriated Brooke Shields—which would have been considered an “original artwork” in an edition of 1,000 and sell it for $999. I gather he was persuaded not to proceed with that plan when lawyers showed up at his gallery door.
Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 1983

13. Alfred Steiglitz, Spiritual America, 1923
Prince named his version after Alfred Steiglitz’s Spiritual America—a close-up of a gelded horse that Steiglitz intended as commentary on the impotence of American culture. Prince applied this same title to what is nothing more than a soft-core photo intended to make money for the photographer and Brooke Shields’s agent/mother.
Prince’s Spiritual America responds directly to the Stieglitz, replacing the castrated male life force with what has been called “a grotesquely seductive vision of prepubescent female sexuality.” Given Prince’s interests, his version reads as an equally scathing commentary on American culture, but now seen as a culture that routinely exploits the female body.
Alfred Steiglitz, Spiritual America, 1923

14. Criminals and Celebrities, 1989
Throughout the 1980s, Prince continued producing appropriated images that focused on the vernacular culture—drawing from high-fashion magazines and, it would appear, from gossip rags for pictures like Criminals and Celebrities.
Richard Prince: Criminals and Celebrities, 1989
Criminals and Celebrities, 1989

15. Bikinis, Boats and Trucks, 1986
This is from the Gangs series, his grid images, where he grouped similar pictures he’d collected onto a single photographic sheet.
Richard Prince: Bikinis, Boats and Trucks, 1986
Bikinis, Boats and Trucks, 1986

16. He culled pictures from biker magazines
He culled pictures from biker magazines. Apparently bikers sent in pictures of their girlfriends for publication and so we have the Girlfriends.
Richard Prince: Girlfriend, #9, 1992
Girlfriend, #9, 1992

17. Also around this time, Prince turned back to painting, producing the Jokes series
Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything, 1987
Tell Me Everything, 1987

18. and the Hood series—in which he used the hoods of muscle cars as the “canvas” for paintings which, at first, he commissioned from body shops. Over time he learned how to apply the paint himself.
Richard Prince: Point Courage, 1989
Point Courage, 1989

19. In the mid 1990s, Prince moved to upstate New York and began photographing the world around him. He professes to see no difference between photographing photographs and photographing the world.
Richard Prince: Untitled, upstate,
Untitled, Upstate,

20. The latest bodies of work—the Nurses and the de Kooning series—are, like the Jokes, paintings. But like virtually all of Prince’s work, they too deal with issues of appropriation.
Richard Prince: Registered Nurse

21. To make the Nurses paintings, Prince transfers an enlarged inkjet print of the cover of 50s pulp novels about nurses—these were considered rather racy in their day—to canvas and then applies his paint, removing other characters in the process. So the focus is on the isolated figure of the nurse herself and the lettering.
Richard Prince: Piney Woods Nurse

22. Richard Prince: Nurse of Greenmeadow

23. In his series of de Kooning paintings, he does a job of double appropriation, blending images from Willem de Kooning’s Women painting with images pulled from porn magazines. These latter are both men and women so the result is unnervingly hermaphroditic.
White de Kooning #1, 2007

24. Willem DeKooning, Woman III, 1953
The master himself, Willem de Kooning from 1953.
Willem DeKooning, Woman III, 1953

25. Richard Prince: Britney Spears, 2000

26. And in a final piece de resistance, Prince has lately been appropriating on a truly grand scale. He has commissioned a muscle car to be built for him. The company making this car uses vintage muscle car parts—in this case, from a 1970s Challenger in an edition of three—with modern guts. He has then been exhibiting this as a “Richard Prince”—a kind of Duchampian readymade for the American car culture.

27. Bibliography
Mia Fineman, “The Pleasure Principle: Richard Prince’s Post-Pulp Art Takes a New Step,” in Slate, 10/3/03.
Andy Grundberg, “Richard Prince, Rephotographer” in The Crisis of the Real. (New York: Aperture, 1999).
Daryl Lang, “Prince Print Sets Auction Record for Photography,” Photo District News, November 9, 2005.
Randy Kennedy, “The Duchamp of the Muscle Car, The New York Times, September 23, 2007.
Randy Kennedy, “If a Copy Is an Artwork, Then What Is the Original?” The New York Times, December 6, 2007.
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, (New York: Prentice Hall/Abrams, 2002).
Peter Schjeldahl, “The Joker,” in The New Yorker, 12/28/07.
Roberta Smith, “Pilfering a Culture Out of Joint” in The New York Times, 9/28/07.
Carol Squiers and Brian Wallis, “Is Richard Prince a Feminist?” in Art in America, 11/1/93.
Spiritual America website, Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, 2007.