By rephotographing an image from a magazine to make his 1977
work Untitled (couple), Richard Prince extracted the
uncanny from the generic. For Michael Newman rephotography gives
this couple - with their shiny faces and dated clothes - the
afterlife of ghosts or vampires. He explores this work in relation
to a decisive shift in the image after conceptual art in the
context of American popular culture. Drawing on his previously
unpublished 1983 interview with Prince as well as the artist's own
writings, Newman discusses the connections of Untitled
(couple) to ideas of allegory, simulacrum, fiction and the
formation of personal identity in a society of commodity and
spectacle.
'[Newman] astutely links the artist's photographs to Dan Graham's
Homes for America and Warhol's blank silk screens, [and]
historicises what it meant to be a thief of images in the tawny
sunlight of Reagan's "Morning in America".'
- Eric Banks, Bookforum
