Sticker Shock
New work by Richard Prince, who artfully plays with erotic photos
Richard Prince is the artist who made “rephotographing” (taking photographs of photographs in publications like the New York Times) famous and whose work—from “Cowboy” sculptures to “Naughty Nurse” paintings— is priced in the millions. “Rephotography is a technique for stealing (pirating) already existing images,” Prince wrote in “Practicing Without a License” in 1977, “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.” His artistic process has not come without controversy: he was sued in 2008 by the photographer whose work was the source of Prince’s “Canal Zone” series; the case was settled in 2014. An untitled series of new work by Prince recently caught PROVOKR’s eye: it’s a collection of vintage nudie shots, in which the naughty parts are (mostly) covered by DVD and CD stickers, which, says Juxtapoz magazine, “give the images a fresh and previously absent depth of narrative.” In honor of Mr. Prince’s modus operandi we’ve appropriated ten of them:
