Dr. Anthony Bannon Speaks. The Preparedness to See

Form your right hand into an open C. Move it around your visual field as if you were focusing a large lens. You have just signed the American Sign Language gesture for the word “search.” At the Juror Talk of the Atlanta Photography Group 2010 Portfolio Show on December 4, Dr. Anthony Bannon of the George Eastman House helped us search for evidence of a relationship between the viewer and the artists whose work was so carefully mounted on the walls – and taught us how to sign the gesture for search. As the noted juror for the show that is the capstone of the Atlanta Photography Group’s rich visual season, Dr. Bannon led us into a journey of searching, then seeing.

Preface

“In Portfolio, we are looking not only for the uniqueness of the singular event, but for the establishment of a language system; a way of expressing oneself.” These were the words used by Dr. Bannon to introduce the Portfolio Show exhibit. The images on the wall, six for each of the ten artists selected by Dr. Bannon for the exhibit, are not intended to be islands of meaning. Rather they collectively express a language within each portfolio that translates the internal sight of the artist into a visual short story that is played out on the gallery walls.

Dr. Bannon encouraged us to be highly aware of searching out and seeing the story of the art. “Art is a high octane example of the cognitive process,” he said. We need to consider not only what is out there, but our preparedness to see it. He relates the example of a soldier traveling through a forest. If the soldier is prepared to see only trees, he will be blind to the enemy dressed to look like trees. He is likely then to pay the dearest price because he did not enter the forest prepared to see.

Dr. Bannon asked us to prepare ourselves to see the stories on the walls. We journey then along with him as he took us through the chapter and verse of each artist. We take this walk in the same order as Dr. Bannon did, and note the name given by the artist to the portfolio portrayed.

Torso Series
Copyright 2010 June Yong Lee

June Yong Lee. Torso Series. In this work we observe a mapping of the flesh – the torso flayed and spread, as if it were on a cold hard dissection table. “It’s not the most attractive flesh, and indeed that is part of the point, I think,” Dr. Bannon stated, “to challenge us to see what might be difficult to look at.” We are accustomed to seeing photographs of well-formed bodies, naked or nearly so, glowing in perfection in the golden sun. Are we prepared to see the lumps, incisions, and blemishes of the six images on the wall? For, as Dr. Bannon said, “This manifests the fragility of our time on this earth as you see the marks and the scars of various transgressions.” Truth, indeed, is frequently challenging to see.

Derelict Garden 02
Copyright 2010 Richard Ediger

Richard Ediger. The Garden After Eden. Since my own work is in the exhibition, I must step carefully here. Commenting on how frequently botanical life is depicted photographically, Dr. Bannon wondered “How often are we asked to look at the stilled life of plants?” His use of the term stilled life in place of the usual still life gives something to think about. He goes on, “There is in the shadow and in the light of this work, even in the clumsiness of the composition…something that drew me in with a delight.” Clumsiness? My own choice of words might have been something like appealing atypicality. Oh well, Dr. Bannon was the one speaking here, not me. “Think of Jung’s use of the shadow as that ‘bag of all the clothes of our previous perceptions’ that we lug around and so influence us…Here as well, the work in the shadow and the darkness…in the irresolute quality the image…I found of particular appeal.” There was also the word messiness in there somewhere but I forget exactly where. You can see what is essentially the artist statement for the series here. 

Interior with Stairs
Copyright 2010 Paul D'Amato

Paul D’Amato. Entropy. In Atlanta the genre of “southern photography” is as familiar as the creases on our faces. The vision of structures that have seen better days is familiar territory for us: the detached metal siding, the aging water towers, the Coca-Cola signs fading away to nothingness, and the rust-weary ’58 Buicks in the field. Dr. Bannon saw though in this portfolio of familiar scenes, “A lovely tone poem…as we look at the notational structure of the chords that you are playing, you have invited in the clarity of its music…to look inside and find unique attributes that we merit as being intrinsically or esthetically worthy.” While stating that this body of work is the most conservative in the exhibit, Dr. Bannon pointed out, “What opened the door for me was the way the good doctor worked structurally with the tectonics of space…the way he so articulately played different textures and different surfaces.” If we are prepared to see the old in a new way, classic southern photography might become instead, “the New South photography.”



Shopping #16
Copyright 2010 Gina Randazzo

Gina Randazzo. Shopping. The titles on the images may read, “Shopping”, but in this portfolio we do not see the brilliant reds, greens, and blues of the mall and of the magazine ad. Instead we see black and we see white, but with almost no grays to moderate the contrast between these extremes. Dr. Bannon told us that, “This is about the organization of space. I selected this in honor of Black Friday.” After the predicable chuckles from those gathered, he went on to state that the portfolio, “Is an interesting and unique take on the shop and the shopping experience and how it reveals itself.” It is almost as if the artist were asking us to consider what the adventure to the mall is all about. Where the magazines preach light, Ms. Randazzo goes dark on us. The question is whether this visage is a matter of artistic style, or rather is a sermon of the seeming nihilism of the shopping rampage we are all guilty of this time of year.



Zen Garden 9
Copyright 2010 Jill Ediger

Jill Ediger. Pondering Paths. Dr. Bannon, rather than first reviewing this portfolio’s physical perceptions, looked more closely at its emotional impact. He stated, “You might say reflective, meditative, but I think better of the word contemplation to this work. By that I mean …being intently and intensely present in the moment. That is…what the practice of photography offers to us anyway: the intense awareness of that fraction of time in focused space and through that intensity...an intense living in the moment.” Referencing the portfolio content, he went on, “In every incidence here there is…some barrier, some discrepancy, between our practiced ways of looking at things and what is the unique experience this time out. And isn’t that after all what we look for in art?” As with many of the portfolios selected by Dr. Bannon, this one offers a subtle change in point of view that takes us away from what we are usually prepared to see.

Currituck Lighthouse 06
Copyright 2010 Ken Krugh

Kent Krugh. Currituck Beach Lighthouse. Standing in front of this portfolio, Dr. Bannon told us, “His work was the most articulate in regard to telling a story. In that sense it is the most journalistic. There is a sense of mystery and darkness. The special pleasure of exploring shapes…We are presented something that we know very well. Kent has given us the opportunity to do that with a sense of discovery about what is presented and about what is withheld. His work works best in terms with what is withheld. It is not usually about the stairs itself, although it signified the stairs…the bulk of the image is not the stairs. It is that other space. The space that contextualizes the experience…Again, it is kind of search.”

The Sea Inside no. 3390
Copyright 2010 Svjetlana Tepavcevic

Svjetlana Tepavcevic. The Sea Inside. The calming vision of waves gently rolling onto the soft sand does not prepare us for this portfolio. We are not used to seeing, in such close-up perspective, water with this much violence. Dr. Bannon reminded us that, “Water itself has its own rich signifier. It is interesting to me that way she plays within the language of the art of the sea.” The language here speaks in shouts, not whispers. Dr. Bannon compared this portfolio with the water language of Robert Longo, as seen here, where the waves speak the same dialect as of those of Ms. Tepavcevic. “For me it is all that water can be,” stated Dr. Bannon, “all that the ocean is for us.” The use of the simple word all gives finality to the story here. After acknowledging that this portfolio defines water as “all that it can be”, what more is there to say?

Main House Wall
Copyright 2010 Jan Kapoor

Jan Kapoor. Island Light. With a good natured laugh, Dr. Bannon nominated this artist as the curmudgeon of the year. Those of us who know Jan initially wrinkled our brows in question to this dubious award. Then came the explanation. “Look at how she is pushing us around…she is all over the place. She’s in color; she in black and white…While she appears to be sympathetic to the truthful organization of our thoughts, once she has you she starts fussing with you.” He went on to ask, “What is indeed parallel and what isn’t…The focus is all over the place. What is the focus? What is the point of view? Where is the traditional compositional value? Goodness Gracious. It is so wonderful. Chaos. This is a complement.”

Dr. Bannon took this opportunity to give us some insight about a theory of art that was developed in the 1960’s, asking, “Is art about making order? No. It is not…It is the opposite.” Referencing the book Man’s Rage for Chaos. Biology, Behavior, and the Arts by Morse Peckham, Dr. Bannon related the theory that our search in art is, “for the discrepancy, for the unexpected, for the chaotic…There’s no news in old news.” So, for Dr. Bannon, it is the apparent disorganization and the unexpected shattering of the compositional norms that drew him to this portfolio.

Green Ball and Sneaks
Copyright 2010 Tom Meiss

Tom Meiss. Ten Pairs. The runner up curmudgeon award went to this portfolio, according to Dr. Bannon. What is on the walls is, “an invitation to assemble meaning from a variety of impulses. His bedfellow is the poetry of Ezra Pound that takes the fragments of wisps of notions or images and puts them forward without linking one idea to another.” Tom, in his journeys along the streets of Atlanta, finds a reflection here, a piece of detritus there, a puzzling shadow around the corner. Dr. Bannon continued with, “He flows with some mystery and ambiguity different things together in a matter that is not particular in with respect to composition. I haven’t a clue what this would be. I would love to spend some time with it and figure it out, and that would be the adventure.” Tom, in his preparedness to see, finds and captures the little quirks of reality around us that most of us miss. Dr. Bannon ran with these quirks and was prepared to see adventure.

Tabor City, North Carolina
Copyright 2010 David Simonton

David Simonton. Of This Place: Photographs from North Carolina. Plowing some the same field as Tom and Jan, David also toys with our expectations. We see a car and then we don’t. The pieces on the wall, superficially classical in perspective, have their studied kinks if we see deeply enough. Dr. Bannon gestured at the image seen here, and stated that it, “looks a bit bluntly ill-composed. It doesn’t offer a vanishing point. It doesn’t organize according to the golden mean…Look at what the guy is doing: the positive and negative spaces over and over again.” Dr. Bannon exhorted us to look deeply into the work of the artist, “After a bit we understand some of his tools, some of his devices, some of his tropes that he is using. The fun of puzzling out a picture. That is a good way to end.”

The Last Word

And when all was over, Chip Simone said it best, “We came here expecting photography but came away with poetry.”

Text other than direct quotations copyright 2010 by Richard Ediger.

Spotlight on Dorothy O'Connor. The Making of Crocheting the Ocean

Dorothy O'Connor
© 2010 Richard Ediger

How do you begin, when the dream in your heart wants to create the dark blue sea around you and sail away? Make the boat of course. That is what Dorothy O’Connor did when she created her new tableau image Crocheting the Ocean. If you have been paying attention at all to the rising stars of the Atlanta art photography scene, you will know that Dorothy has, for the past five years, created darkly mysterious scenes highlighting a lovely face in a lush dress and often a forest of leaves, vintage furnishings, and a deep sense of story.

Crocheting the Ocean
© 2010 Dorothy O'Connor

Many of us first saw Crocheting the Ocean at the Atlanta Celebrates Photography 2010 Auction in October, where Dorothy was honored as being among the select few “Ones To Watch” artists. Given a little time with the print we could see that the title was fairly literal to the scene. But why, oh why, has the angel in the golden garb embarked on the monumental, perhaps eternal, task that Dorothy has assigned to her? There certainly must be an engrossing backstory there somewhere. What is it, and how did the scene come about? After wondering for two months, I did the sensible thing and simply asked Dorothy.

She kindly invited me into her home to tell the story. After Dorothy warned me about the large gray furry creature at my feet that loves to nurse on unsuspecting visitors, we settled into a long conversation. A narrative image has to start somewhere, and with Crocheting the Ocean it was indeed the boat. “I got a hankering to build a boat,” she told me. Simple enough, but why? What is the symbolism here? The short answer is that Dorothy’s muse initially worked on her unconscious. She says that she had few conscious thoughts about the why – just the what and how. The why came later.

So, hammer and nails, paper-mâché and glue, and slowly a boat is built. It floats only on Dorothy’s ocean of imagination but it floats well. What will serve as the sea? Visions of blue yarn came bidding – lots of blue yarn. Dorothy says that she has always had busy hands, and a few evenings with a crochet hook should do it. But the ocean is big and to make one is hardly a weekend task. Many evenings and many balls of yarn later, Dorothy’s boat finally had something to float on. A few evenings? How about seven months of evenings? Yes, seven months. Oh to be sure, Dorothy has a life. It is just that her photography is her life and if it takes half a year to complete an artistic vision, so be it.

Oceans are wide too. But take a look at Dorothy’s scene. It somehow seems compressed and constrained. Rather than the vastness you might imagine, the walls close in. You are in a boat but the boat is in the boat’s captain’s quarters. It is a very Escheresque experience to be in the presence of the scene, trying to eke out meaning from the incongruities.

Dorothy’s scene is not static by any means. The golden figure in the boat is busy with the crochet hook. The ocean made with her hands flows effortlessly over the gunwale. It is as if the very fabric of the ocean is being created out of nothingness like some elementary particle popping into existence from the other-dimensional vacuum of space.

And who is that figure in the boat anyway? Is it Botticelli’s Venus, or the Queen of Heaven, or simply Dorothy? I think that Dorothy knows, but she’s not saying. She does say though that while the fabric of the ‘why’ for the scene is very thin, it may have something to do with all our wishes and dreams, realized or not, moving across the ocean of our lives. The boat is the bundle of what we want while the ocean – the unending ocean that is being continuously created anew – may be too large for us to beach the boat within the Land of Fulfilled Desires in the time given us. The clock on the mantle in the scene is there for a reason, reminding us of our limited time. What I find fascinating about Dorothy’s vision here is that she did not understand this symbolism until she had lived with the scene for quite a while. It was borne of experience rather than preconceived thought. You wonder why her muse is toying with her so.

Through the encouragement and generous funding by Louis Corrigan and the Possible Futures philanthropic foundation, Dorothy’s narrative scenes have had a life that is much longer than the blink-of-an-eye exposure of her 8x10 view camera. Mr. Corrigan, after seeing Dorothy’s work three years ago, made it possible for her to host a tableau vivant, or living scene, in her studio that replicates the narrative of her photographs. Dorothy said, “I am grateful to him for about a hundred million things.”  BURNAWAY lauded last year’s installment, and her to-date annual studio opening is one of the most anticipated events of Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s October bonanza.

This year’s Dorothy O’Connor tableau vivant was one for the perfect evening books. There was just the barest chill in the air to make the wood burning in the firepits a common gathering place for the Dorothy enthusiasts assembled in her backyard. While the trees twinkled with creative lighting and the tables groaned with food and drink, the attraction was the tableau. As one who knows how to build suspense, Dorothy kept the doors to her studio locked until exactly the appointed hour. Then they flew open and we crowded shoulder-to-wine glass in the small space to see the Lady of the Boat crocheting the ocean. I must say that seeing the living installation topped even the static photograph I saw in the ACP Auction. A wonderful touch that wasn’t in the photo was the Lady periodically taking her eyes from the vanishing point where she had been blankly staring, then glancing at the ticking clock on the mantle for a few moments before returning to move the crochet hook ever more vigorously.

I asked my wife Jill the next morning over coffee what she thought the whole narrative meant to her. The answer came easily, “The endlessness of eternity. We have to get it all done before our time is due.” This is eerily close to Dorothy’s own hints of the meaning of the tableau to her own inner self. Dorothy told me that she does not wish to ascribe meanings to her tableaux, rather she asks her viewers to assemble their own significance to her creations.

One thing that strikes you when viewing the Crocheting the Ocean scene for the first time is its complexity.  There are things in there – on the walls, floor, and even the ceiling that are easily missed in the photograph. Did you see an octopus in a jar in the photo? I didn’t initially but by golly it was there, as big as life. Where did the octopus come from anyway? Yes, it is real, and yes, you could cook it up into a nice insalata di polpo if you wished.

Dorothy and I talked about the detail in her tableaux. Her desire to retain all the nooks and crannies is why she uses a view camera. Yet only by spending time with the live scene in her studio can you gain the true appreciation of the artistic thought that has gone into creating the piece. I wonder if there is not a way to recreate the scene somewhere so it lives on for the continual enjoyment for those of us who love Dorothy’s sense of narrative. The same thing of course could be said for many other memorable pieces of installation art we have seen in Atlanta the past year. Perhaps we should put this bundle of desire into Dorothy’s boat and hope it reaches the Land of Fulfilled Desires before the spring on the clock unwinds.

Text other than direct quotations copyright 2010 by Richard Ediger.

Appropriation in Photographic Art: I. Controversy as a Business Plan

Sometimes it’s complicated. You carry your serious camera into the High Museum and the guy behind the security desk tells you that you need to sign a piece of paper. The sheet says that you agree to the rules:  I can take photos on the first and third floor on this wing but not on the second floor of the other wing. Then when I do take photos on even the approved floors I cannot sell them to someone else. Sure, I can agree to this on principle but I wonder if I can show them in a gallery if only a small part of my picture contains the forbidden work? Is that allowed? Then what about that clever Roy Lichtenstein house in the central courtyard? Is that fair game for the lens? And the most complicated question of it all is always looming in the background. What will the juror at the next show think if half my picture has someone else’s art in it? Like I said, it’s complicated.

The whole topic of making art from other art, or appropriation as it is known in art review circles, is a topic that can be questionable in the best of times and downright contentious in others. Interest in appropriation in fine art seems to peak when a particularly significant exhibit opens that accentuates the point. Whenever the reviews are published by the likes of the New York Times, shortly afterward dozens of blogs light up with appropriation in their titles so they can get their word in edgewise.

Perhaps it is time to step back a couple of paces and see what this whole appropriation thing can mean to the practicing photographer who is simply trying to make good art. The trail to and from appropriation has quite a few twists and turns. It is not a simple topic that can be covered in a paragraph or two, or even in a blog posting or two. Random Radiance will try to delve into the subject at some depth. This means that you can expect a few chapters of the story spread out over a period of time. Follow along as long as it remains interesting to you. Let’s start with the first installment.

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989
Richard Prince (1)

Some of us first stumbled across the appropriation issue not through some subtle reference, but by being hit directly in the eye by perhaps the top-ranking example. How could you avoid, in 2005, seeing that Christies sold the first photograph to go for a cool $1 million-plus?

Turning the clock back to 2005, you might have wondered if it was an early Steichen, or perhaps a previously unidentified Le Gray that garnered that price. To great surprise, it was a just picture of a rugged guy galloping out of the picture on a horse. It certainly didn’t resemble what you might think a headline-leading photo would look like. It was by someone named Richard Prince, who you likely had never heard of before. If you were a little curious you might have read a few sentences about the photograph. Then, as you read, the next words that may have tumbled out of your own mouth may have been “Say what? The million dollar picture is simply a photograph of a 20-year-old magazine ad for Marlboros?” Coming back to today, you may still be wondering how on earth this could be. If so, you are trapped by the allure of appropriation. It’s confusing, fascinating to some, and deliciously controversial to all. Prince’s Untitled  (Cowboy) is the poster child for appropriation.

Untitled (four single men with interchangeable
background looking to the right), 1977
Richard Prince (2)

We’ll use the Richard Prince example to learn something about how a superficially simple image can sometimes be said to represent a whole world of cultural behavior. But first we will see how an artist can rely on controversy as his primary business plan.

Those of you who follow the New York art scene will be familiar with Richard Prince. The rest of you can find more than you ever wanted to know in a dozen places on the Web, including a somewhat comprehensive article on Wikipedia. But if you are too busy to read up on the artist, the Reader’s Digest version relates that Prince first began by making collages from magazine ads, like the one seen here. His next step after cut-and-paste was to simply photograph the ads without the ad copy. He took the film to his corner photo store and had them blow the prints up to wall-filling sizes. Prince initially struggled to sell his work but time has its virtues. The rest is million dollar history.

Who on earth would photograph an ad and try to pass it off as art? Or, a larger question may be, “Who would pay big bucks for one of these art pieces when you could easily do the same thing yourself?” What the Reader’s Digest version of the Richard Prince story leaves out is motivation. When an artist states that one of the leading influences in his life is his own act of carving a four-letter word on his desk in the fifth grade (3), you know that attention-getting things are to come.

Prince, in a 2003 interview, said this in response to a question of how he fell into photography, “I didn't exactly ‘fall’ as much as steal.” (4) This sets the stage for Richard Prince’s art. It is intentionally in-your-face, “I can, so I will” art, with a patent disregard for civility and the artful tradition of quietly looking a pretty pictures on a wall. His whole career has been built on controversy. A collector might think, “This guy is gutsy, brash, and I need to own one just to show how hip I am.”

Untitled (Cowboy), 2001-2002
Richard Prince (5)

Those digging deeper into the descriptions of Prince’s work will note that nearly all his re-photographed pieces are in editions of two. You would be forgiven if you believe that he does this to drive the prices skyward. The calculus is simple: after some benefactor buys one to give to MOMA as a tax write-off, a hedge-fund principal buys the other so he can flip it the following year at a 30% gain. Whatever is behind Prince’s motivation and editioning practice, one must admit that it works for him. An artistic work that you could easily mistake for first year BFA student’s “D-minus” project sells for over a million. This is not the last word though. Another of Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) series sold for well over $3M at Sotheby’s in 2007. This one, from an edition of two again, is actually the artist’s proof for the edition. Now you know why artist’s proofs exist. As an aside, you might want to go here to find out what happened to those astronomical prices just two years later.

So, we have seen that Richard Prince has built a business – a very profitable business – on controversy. He lives on controversial appropriation practices coupled with controversial images. The Tate in London learned the hard way about the outfall of controversy when it had to trash half a million dollars worth of catalogs it has printed for its 2009 “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” exhibit. It turned out that Scotland Yard made the Tate remove a well-known Prince image of a nude 10-year-old Brooke Shield from the exhibit because of obscenity issues, rendering the catalog worthless (while generating more publicity for Prince than he could have bought at almost any price.) If you need more cases of Prince-driven bad behavior, just point your search engine to “Richard Prince Canal Zone” for an example of Prince using not just controversy, but apparent provocation, as a business plan.

You must be thinking that, with all the copying Prince has done of someone else’s photographs without permission, there must be quite a few lawsuits floating around. You are right of course. Some have been settled in favor of the plaintiff, others against. But the publicity surrounding the legal issues is likely to be just part of the intended business plan. One could predict that the publicity value of lawsuits more than defrays the attorney fees and unfavorable judgment costs. We will encounter what the law says about what Prince is doing in a minute.

So, is there anything more to Prince’s work other than provocation? Some would say that the answer is a very definitive ‘yes’. Much of his work could be considered to use parody of others’ artwork to illustrate a greater principle. Let’s look at the Cowboy (Untitled) series of images that were appropriated from Marlboro ads. The photographs in the ads were removed from their original context and placed it in a situation that mocked their original purpose. Prince could be interpreted to be poking fun of the practice of Phillip Morris, owners of the Marlboro brand, of associating the implied bravado of guys in cowboy hats with the imaginary machismo of smoking cigarettes.

Expanding upon this train of thought, the Marlboro ads are in themselves a marketing-powered parody of the American icon of the Cowboy-as-Hero that has been popularized by hundreds of Western movies and Zane Grey novels. And this ubiquitous Hollywood image, too, is a parody of massive proportions. It is no more an accurate representation of the true cattle herders that did and still do ride the range of the American West than Prince’s appropriated Untitled (Cowboy) images.

So in Richard Prince we have a parody of a parody of a parody. While this is interesting from a cultural point of view, it is somewhat off of the main track of this discussion. Why parody, after all? The answer is straightforward. Parody is protected under federal Fair Use copyright laws, allowing artists free reign to use the artwork of others if the intent can be convincingly shown in a court of law to be mockery. Fair Use is a topic we will cover in the next chapter of this discussion so we can understand at least an overview of the legal issues at stake here. For right now though, we can state that Richard Price appears to be quite adept at using the law to his favor.

The final question that comes to mind when considering Richard Prince is, as New York intellectual rights attorney Ray Dowd asks, “Is Prince … a genius or a fraud?” Art critics fall emphatically either to one side of this question or to the other. What do you think?

1.    Untitled (Cowboy), 1989. Richard Prince. Chromogenic print, 50 x 70 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000 (2000.272) © Richard Prince. Source.

2.   Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right), 1977. Richard Prince. Mixed media on paper. 23 x 19 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2000 (2000.123) © Richard Prince. Source.

3.   Interview with Richard Prince, “Like a Beautiful Scar on your Head,” Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 68 –75. (N.B.: no longer published). Source.

4.   “Richard Prince talks to Steve Lafreniere - '80s Then – Interview.”Art Forum, March, 2003. Source.

5.   Untitled (Cowboy), 2001-2002. Richard Prince. Inscribed AP on the reverse, from an edition of two plus one AP, Ektachrome print, 100 by 66 inches. Lot #6, Sotheby’s, New York, Nov 14, 2007. Illustration courtesy Sotheby’s New York. Source.

Text other than direct quotations copyright 2010 by Richard Ediger.

All images are published within the author’s understanding of the Fair Use policies of their source.