Richard Prince

"Most of what’s passing for information right now is total fiction. I try to turn the lie back on itself."

—Richard Prince

Gagosian is pleased to present Richard Prince: Early Photography, (1977–1987). The exhibition, which was presented at the gallery’s Davies Street and Grosvenor Hill locations in London in 2023, features many of Prince’s iconic cowboy, girlfriend, and advertisement photographs, some of which have not previously been exhibited in the city. It also includes the complete series of The Entertainers (1982–83), a rarely seen set of manipulated photographs taken in the bars, clubs, and restaurants of New York’s Times Square that captures the location’s sleazy glamour. Archival material including writings by the artist and source material from his time in the tear-sheet department at Time magazine, some of which has not been shown before, are also on view.

Collecting, chronicling, and repurposing examples of discomfiting mainstream humor alongside images from a variety of mass media, Prince chronicles the intersection of America’s vernaculars and subcultures in the construction of its national identity. In 1977, he began using a process of “rephotography” to appropriate shots from advertising and the lifestyle press, redefining the concepts of authorship and originality—an approach he would later extend to include social media. A conscious elision of the aims and techniques of traditional picture making, the technique allows Prince to redirect the authority of a visual referent. “When you put an already existing image in front of a camera,” he explains, “you know what you’re going to get. You’ve taken out the decisive moment.”