Richard Prince Cowboys & Girlfriends, 1992
Ektacolor prints
Edition: D/Z
24 7/8 in. x 28 7/8 in. (63.18 cm x 73.34 cm)
The men and women in these photographs by Richard Prince are American myths: Cowboys on horses, “biker chicks” on Harleys. As the myths go, they live outside conventional boundaries—the cowboys on the open range, tanned and weathered by decades of honest work; the bikers (in a more sordid, subcultural myth) on the open road, always down for a good time and unafraid to get a little motor grease on their hands.
And yet, despite this gratuitous display of sensational imagery, the photos (culled from two previous series—Cowboys and Girlfriends) open up an uncanny distance between the subjects and the viewer.
This effect is due, in part, to the fact that these are not original photographs, but rather photographs of photographs—“rephotographs” sourced from magazines.
As the Richard Prince origin story goes, the artist was, in 1977, working in the Time- Life Building in Manhattan, where his sole job was to tear out editorials from magazines and send the copy to writers in other departments of the Time-Life media corporation. Therefore, he was often left to his own devices for 8-12 hours a day with nothing to do but look at the ads and images in magazines. Soon enough, Prince began experimenting with these images, not by collaging, but rephotographing them and, in the process, cropping out the ad copy or other graphics so that only the images, estranged from their initial function as part of an ad concept, remained. That’s how he produced the Cowboys photographs, for example, which were famously cropped from ads for Marlboro cigarettes.
This deadpan approach initially appealed to Postmodern critics—like his reframing of mass media imagery “caught seduction in the act,” as theorist and art historian Hal Foster put it1. That is, the simple operation showed, as if for the first time, what the seemingly innocuous images were really doing: through Prince’s work, the idea goes, one can better see that Marlboro cigarette ads aren’t selling (or aren’t primarily selling) cigarettes, but rather an entire ideology. Moreover, in fact, they are actively shaping that ideology.
To some extent, Prince went along with this reading of the work (and it certainly is in there) but as he continued producing more, it became clear that, for better or worse, his voice as an artist wasn’t solely focused on illustrating postmodern theory.
Rather, the Prince that emerged after that body of work has branched off into other media. Among other things, he has also become a controversial purveyor of the white, middle-class American male id, particularly as expressed in rowdy subcultures like the motorcycle “biker chick” world of the Girlfriends. Unlike the Cowboys, the source images here are not lushly art-directed beauty shots; they’re washed-out snapshots with amateur models whose agency seems questionable as they were taken from the back pages of magazines like Easyriders, where readers would submit amateur snapshots of their own “girlfriends” posed on bikes. The Girlfriends are often presented in grids called “gangs” (named, in part, after a photo lab technique for “ganging” together images on a single sheet of paper), so that they could be viewed as a typology, like a braindead American spin on Bernd and Hilla Becher’s serial photography of German industrial architecture.
Series like the Girlfriends have rightly garnered criticism from feminists who charge Prince with misogyny: what, ultimately, is the critical value of showing these women? Aren’t they really images of women taken by men for the purpose of circulating them like trophies or objects to an audience of other men? One counterargument is that he’s only showing what’s already out there in the dregs of white culture and the role of the artist should not be that of a moralist. But as time moves on and these images themselves become part of a historical record, one of the most consistent and legible aspects of Prince’s work is the simple fact that it’s lonely: these are photographs taken of photographs. There’s something sad about that. Is Prince exploring his own crude desires? Yes, but it’s always a desire cut short and unfulfilled—a desperate desire, trapped in images.
1 Foster, Hal. “The Expressive Fallacy” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics,
(Washington: Bay Press, 1985), pg. 68