In the mid-1970s, Richard Prince was an aspiring painter working in Time Inc.’s tear-sheet department, clipping texts for magazine writers. After removing the articles, he was left with advertisements: glossy pictures of commodities, models, cowboys, and other objects of desire. Assuming ads were in the public domain, Prince began to re-photograph them with a 35mm camera, framing imagery to eliminate text. He took his slides to commercial labs to be developed and printed, then presented the large-scale, limited-edition prints as artworks of his own. Prince’s re-photography had an explosive effect on the art world, provoking lawsuits and setting auction records. With this controversial practice, he redefined what it means to “take” a photograph.
Among all the advertisements calling for attention from magazines and billboards, Prince was repeatedly drawn to the long-running “Marlboro Man” campaign, an elaborate fantasy of rugged outdoorsmanship designed to help Marlboro parent company Philip Morris shift consumers’ attention from the dangers of cigarette smoking to a dream of life in the vast American West. Appropriating these images, Prince took aim at myths of masculinity and the frontier while drawing fire from the commercial photographers who had shot the campaign images. He further cemented his “ownership” of the cowboy motif in subsequent sculptures and paintings.
For the 2015–16 series Untitled (cowboy), Prince revisited copies of Time from the 1980s and 1990s with the capacities of contemporary technology in mind. He scanned Marlboro advertisements at high resolution and digitally eliminated text, while retaining torn edges and pieces of tape. Enlarged to more than seven feet wide, this two-page spread—showing a pair of cowboys on horseback at sunrise—achieves the grandeur of nineteenth-century history painting through digital means. Once again challenging the conventional limits and meanings of the photographic medium, Prince reignites debates he sparked some forty years ago.
Britt Salvesen
2025
