Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.
Of course, it IS his deposition.
For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!
In the mean time, though, S’AdS has posted an excerpt from the [200 page] transcript, where Prince discusses the development of his Cowboy photos. It’s very good stuff:
I made what was essentially a page torn out of a magazine, I made it into a real photograph. And I believe my contribution is something that was new at the time.
I came up with the term rephotography. It had never been done before.
And I remember thinking that my camera, this mechanical apparatus that I imagined to be an electronic scissor, was a new way of dealing with collage. You no longer saw the Scotch tape, you no longer saw the tear or the seam, I got rid of all of that.
I also realized much later that I got rid of the decisive moment. I changed the history of photography that day. The decisive moment, it was, no longer had to do with luck, you know.
Ironically, Prince, in revisiting the Cowboy photos over the years, began making sumptuous, large-scale photos that not only showed but exulted in the scotch tape, the tear, the seam. They’re the rephotography version of the bravura brushstroke, a celebration of the artistic process.
Like with these 2010s Cowboy rephotographs, Prince really had a virtuosic turn with his second deposition. Familiarity with a medium can sometimes leave you in a rut, but it can also free you up.
Richard Prince | On Cowboys [@santandreadescaphis]