Richard Prince Landscape Photography

Artist: Richard Prince Title: Untitled (from Upstate) Year: 1998 Medium: Ektacolor photograph on Kodak Professional paper Edition: 8; signed, dated and numbered (verso) Sheet: 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm) Frame: Yes Certificate of Authenticity included This early, vintage work from 1998 by Richard Prince is part of his "Upstate" series. In 1996 Richard Prince moved to upstate New York and began a new series of creative investigations. After almost two decades of making work derived from images and phrases that already exist in popular culture, he took his camera outside and photographed the banal details of his everyday environment. Although this could be viewed as a radical departure, to Prince there is no essential difference between making photos of other photos and making photos of the world at large. He is always paying attention to what is around him with intense scrutiny. On one level, the "Upstate" photos chronicle a landscape of economic decline in an unremarkable semirural area. Pictures of above-ground swimming pools and melancholy images of abandoned-looking basketball hoops perched on the edge of overgrown fields suggest a region cut off from the cultural mainstream. However, Prince finds quiet moments of beauty in these overlooked and undervalued features of the landscape. The "Upstate" series typifies Prince's process of making art through the reproduction and displacement of pop culture iconography, often with a touch of mordant humor, an approach that has been deeply influential in the development of appropriation art since the 1960s, and which has invited comparisons between Prince and contemporaries such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Jack Goldstein...