Richard Prince takes images from adverts- books, magazines etc.- and re-photographs them without any of the text of the original advert, just the photograph. Prince suggests that they are taken from the editorial world, because 'most editorial photographs sit beside a whole page of text. They work together. But what happens when you just hang a photograph alone? People look at them and see them on an aesthetic level.' The images are displayed in exhibitions in galleries, printed large and framed quite classically. As Prince said, this means that the images are looked at in a totally different context to their original purpose- instead of viewing them as an advert, they are being viewed as a standalone image, and people therefore come to them with a different mindset. Straight away, they are viewing them with notions of them being an artwork rather than an advert. We immediately ask, what is this image trying to say to me, rather than, what is this image trying to sell?
We interpret the images as a comment on society today, and the problems that Prince thinks we are faced with. The image above, for example, is one of his earlier works, in which he re-photographed cowboys that were being used in Marlboro adverts. The classic icons of the American dream, as well as masculinity, were being used to sell cigarettes; so once the cigarette packet has been removed, what does the image become? A critique of the advertising industry, at modern notions of masculinity, consumerism. As well as this, it could also be questioning what makes an image a piece of art- before, this image would not have been considered art in any way, as it was in the pages of a magazine, advertising a product. But simply by photographing it again and placing it in a frame in a gallery, we view it as art. Therefore it is primarily getting us to think in terms of presence- what has to be present in an image to give us the frameworks we need to classify it, place it within our own knowledge of the world and define what its use is?
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