Research

Richard Prince

(American, born 1949)

In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy.

By 1977, Prince had begun rephotographing these advertisements in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined images as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies—blurring, cropping, enlarging, grouping—that revealed the hallucinatory strangeness, or "social science fiction," of his seemingly natural source material.
http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/pcgn/ho_2000.123.htm

Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right) - Richard Prince

4 Women Looking in the Same Direction - Richard Prince

The Same Man Looking in Different Directions - Richard Prince