In the ‘80s Richard Prince rephotographed a famous cigarette ad (the iconic cowboy riding a horse), cropped out the text, and presented it as his own work. By recontextualizing it, he transformed the shot into capital-A Art.
Appropriation art was not a new idea — Sturtevant’s painting repeats, Warhol’s soup cans, Duchamp’s urinal, and so on, probably back to the second-ever cave painting. But Prince’s appropriation did, and still does, stir up controversy.
Concerns of copyright, fair use, “added value” (changing the original enough to call it a new work), originality, authorship, ownership, effort, legacy, history, and of course acknowledgment and compensation are even more of a concern now that text-to-image A.I. can generate (appropriate) any style of art or artist you want. “Generate a Frank Lloyd Wright drawing”, “Make a painting in the style of Basquiat”.
Unlike Prince, all the photos in this post appropriate (hijack) the event not the shot. With the staging stolen, the images are recontextualized. They are candid pictures of other people’s mediated messages. They are meta-photos of a crime scene, an advertising campaign, a tv production, an Only Fans session, a fashion shoot, a text home, a family album, wedding photos, dating app pics, Instagram posts, TikToks (with faux paparazzi), and selfies, selfies, selfies…