Richard Prince

a suite of 4 Ektacolor prints, each signed, dated, and editioned '4/10' in ink on the reverse, framed, 1979 (4)

Other prints of these images:

Nancy Spector, Richard Prince (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007), pp. 25 and 61-62

Richard Prince: Paintings - Photographs (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002), pp. 12-13

Spiritual America: Richard Prince (Aperture and IVAM, The Valencian Institute of Modern Art, 1989), p. 72 (2 images)

These prints are in generally excellent condition. As is typical of Ektacolor prints, there appears to have been a color shift, as is indicated by the darker area around the periphery of one of the prints, which has been covered by the mat.
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The present series is among Richard Prince's earliest appropriated photographic works, and springs directly from his work at Time Inc., where he was employed in the Tearsheets department.  Laboring in one of the sub-basement floors below the Time-Life building's lobby, Prince's sole (and solitary) function was to separate editorial content, page-by-page, from the advertisements of various magazines, so that articles were available to editors without extraneous paper. Prince began to collect and compare these leftover images, and discerned patterns among them—similar compositions, gestures, and angles, for instance.  He set up a secret studio in one of the nearby rooms that served as storage areas, where there was little danger that he would be disturbed.  The rooms were rarely accessed, and he often worked the graveyard shift.  At first he made collages with the ephemera, but in 1977, he began to photograph, crop, and enlarge the glossy magazine advertising images, sans their associated texts—first of living rooms; then of luxury objects, such as VO whiskey labels, pens, and watches; next of models, as individuals and as couples; and later, of cowboys—and appropriated them as his own.

The familiar images in these ads appeal to a generation of viewers immersed in consumer mass-media; these hyper-realized 'rephotographs,' however, with their visible half-tone dots and shifting color and contrast, raise the question of what is real—what are real objects, and what is real in the media.  By removing them from their original banal, ubiquitous context, and with the aid of enlargement, vignetting, and serialization, Prince has enhanced their sleekness and artifice.  These images of special or limited edition objects—masculine, traditionally affordable by only a few wealthy, corporate types—are used by Prince to make subsequent limited editions that, if framed and on the wall, take on a sense of greater importance than their original counterparts.  They call into question the validity of an aspirational consumerist society and the value of the aesthetic experience.

With these appropriated images, Prince had broken what Douglas Eklund calls, in The Pictures Generation, 1974 – 1984, 'a law so fundamental and widely accepted that it isn't visible until someone breaks it.  This law maintains that the artist must vouch for the paternity of his (or her) work, that it came from the artist and not some other source' (pp. 152-53).  In 1977, Prince himself wrote,

'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' (Practicing Without a License, http://www.richardprince.com/writings/practicing-without-a-license-1977/).