Richard Prince

According to Randy Kennedy, in the late 1970s, Richard Prince was known as a pioneer of appropriation art, the photographing of other photographs from sources such as magazine ads, enlarging them and showing them in galleries. This, Kennedy suggests, begs the questions “what do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?”

Jim Krants, a commercial photographer, whose photographs had been used as the subject of some of Prince’s works, described it as like “seeing yourself in a mirror.” A mirror that caused him to question whether he “should be proud, or if [he] looked like an idiot.”

Prince describes his work as “trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images.” Kennedy notes Prince was not shy about his intentions as he once said, “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

This brings about the issue of authenticity. Does Prince’s re-photographing of these images then make them art? But why are the commercial photographers inherently not artists?

Prince’s method reminds me of a quote from Picasso where he says, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” I’m not entirely sure how I want to interpret what Prince does and how it relates to that quote. I cannot decide whether I feel his re-photographing of these commercial ads elevates them to high art, or belittles the art of commercial photography.