Untitled (fashion)

Executed in 1980, Richard Prince's Untitled (fashion) is an image based on the seductive power of advertising. Prince typically works in small series and this is a unique photograph that belongs to a further edition of two much smaller prints. The pouted lips and elaborate quiff of this tightly framed glamazon represents a group of early works in which Prince corralled pictures of fashion models for his own artistic ends. Having carefully selected his images based on the recurring nature of the pose, lighting or product featured therein, Prince would then re-photograph his subject, making it his own. This iconoclastic gesture was not only a decisive breakthrough in the artist's own practice, it also ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art making; one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object.

From his day-job in the tear-sheet department of Time-Life publications, Prince had learnt that the isolation of mass-culture imagery offered an opportunity to examine various codes of representation and visual cliché's. For this work, which dominating in its larger-than-life scale, Prince was focused on gathering a series of pictures that feature gorgeous models with their hair draped over one eye. This seemingly mundane observation of a vaguely absurd hairstyle wouldn't elicit a second glance in the pages of a magazine, but Prince's intervention has revealed a form of highly orchestrated fiction. The re-photographed image remains unchanged save for the removal of all identifying text and some careful cropping. Yet this beauty has been transformed by her new context to reveal the mechanisms of seduction and desire that play upon us daily.