viewer to acknowledge the monotonous, frequently
serialized repetition of mass media. The work also
refers to the reproduction potential inherent to the
medium of photography, an important area of phi-
losophical investigation during the last decades of
the twentieth century. Prince presents duplicate
photographs of what appear to be duplicate living
rooms, implying that the elements of modernity
are mass-produced, even its works of art. Prince’s
strategy had an immediate impact on his contem-
poraries—often dubbed The Picture Generation—
especially Sherrie Levine, who became notorious
for re-photographing a classic image by Walker
Evans, and has been a significant influence on con-
temporary artists who emerged in the 1990s, the so-
called ‘‘YBAs’’ or Young British Artists.
Other early appropriation work by Prince
includes his series of photographs of Marlboro
advertisements,Cowboys(1980–1984), for which he
cropped out the text and logo of the popular and
highly successful campaign. The resulting set of
photographs alludes to the consumer’s memory of
the cigarette advertisements and makes an appeal to
the collective American memory of the iconic wes-
tern cowboy. The fragmentary, almost elusive nat-
ure of the works might be said to position Prince as
the lone hero cowboy of the photographic world as
he exposes the way in which advertisers appropriate
visual ideals to romanticize a product. As Prince had
not attended art school and had no training in
photography, this early work was accomplished
with rudimentary means; Prince used cheap com-
mercial blow-ups of his source material, resulting
in grainy, poorly color-balanced reproductions.
In 1983, Prince re-photographed an image of
celebrity Brooke Shields as a young 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. Prince presented his ‘‘re-photograph’’ in a
gallery space in Manhattan he had constructed spe-
cifically for the project, which he titled Spiritual
America. Positioning the photograph in the front of
the gallery, Prince hired an attendant who was told
nothing about the work or its origin.Spiritual Amer-
icagenerated renewed interest in the scandal over the
original photograph that had been denounced as
exploitative and child pornography and also gener-
ated a great deal of interest in the contemporary art
world in Prince’s re-photography project.
The photographs that Prince selected for much of
his work in the early 1980s are of figures of rebellion,
traditional masculine types, and of seductive femi-
ninity. He also appropriated the images of bikers
and their women, punk rockers, French actress
Catherine Deneuve, alternative youths, Superman,
and criminals, figures that 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 (and financially lucrative) re-pre-
sentations. Prince has been sued several times by
the photographers who took the original images,
but he routinely settles these lawsuits.
There often seems to be no common ground
between the subjects Prince juxtaposes, as in
Super Heavy Santa, 1986, which features images
of Superman, heavy metal musicians, and Santa
Claus. The coy title presents no real clue; a close
examination discloses that they share a use of cos-
tumes. InCriminals and Celebrities, 1986, he puts
together images of outlaws and famous people. The
juxtaposition highlights the fact that both criminals
and celebrities often hide their faces from the cam-
eras—criminals from shame and celebrities for
privacy. The combinations in these works also
reference the inconsistent jumbling of mass media,
which places all images on the same plane. Prince’s
arbitrary juxtapositioning however, is made in
clean and uniform grid-like patterns 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. An example is
Velvet Beach, 1984–1985. In this work, Prince pre-
sents 12 square images of waves. Each image shows
the wave with white water in the action of break-
ing, at a tumultuous climactic and chaotic moment.
The images are arranged, however, to form a uni-
form rectangle with consistent white space between
them. The look is like a magazine layout.
At the close of the twentieth century, Prince pro-
duced a prolific amount of his own writing. He also
began to create paintings of text and images. He pairs
a joke, which is an appropriated textual social prop-
erty, with cartoon-like iconography and abstract ges-
tural painting. The jokes are sometimes incomplete
or at their climactic moment. They are often crass or
culturally outdated. The works, though aesthetically
different from his early photography, share a com-
mon intention to evoke familiarity and shock. Like
looking at the familiar photograph, a viewer reads a
familiar joke, but yet is prompted to re-consider it in
a new, more provocative manner.
RachelWardPRINCE, RICHARD