Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
If a picture was once worth a thousand words, one square inch of an image is now worth 360,000 bytes of computer storage space.
Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it’s become the “most” real thing.
I’ve never felt that I had to put out work that I actually liked… just because it’s out there doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind it.
There was a point where I noticed that things had changed in the Marlboro ad. They got rid of the famous guy, a certain model who used to be in all the ads. They took him out and started using other people. That’s when I went after it. That’s when I stole it.... This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.
The other day, I saw a set of photographs I took of fountain pens in 1978 — what the hell was I thinking? It’s so precise. It looks as if I was in control. I wasn’t in control. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so young.
It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called “pirating.” Now they call it “sampling.”
... rather than tear [advertising photographs] out of the magazines and paste them up on a board, I thought why not re-photograph them with a camera and then put them in a real frame with a mat board around the picture just like a real photograph and call them mine. I mean “pirate” them, “steal” them, “sample” them.
My limitations or mistakes become a kind of freedom. Like when I photographed black-and-white pictures with color film, as I did in
Three Women Looking in the Same Direction. Or when I inadvertently overexposed the film and got a bleached-out look, which happened in a recent “gang” called
Live Free or Die. These mistakes always happen because I’m not a photographer. Practicing without a license is the way it’s been referred to.
