Images In The Wild

For our first week task we were instructed to appropriate (take possession of) somebody else’s image, an image already out in the wild, such as in the work of Richard Prince, a man renowned for shamelessly taking other photographer’s images (be they professional or posting something as mundane as a selfie on Instagram) and repackaging them as his own work, be it by cropping or otherwise altering them, and then selling them for six to seven figure sums.

One particular piece of his struck a cord with me.

 

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“Untitled (Cowboy)” from 1989, a cropped and retouched Marlboro magazine advertisement.

I’m unsure why it struck me in the way it did, but I chose to use it’s concept as the basis for my own work here (further appropriating something in the process. Good, eh?). Taking a piece of advertising from an existing piece of media, and using that.

And here is my image…

 

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In the end, I found it in a 1993 issue of Fantastic Four Unlimited, published by Marvel comics and featuring a rather mundane story about the Hulk and the Thing having a bit of a punch-up.

I liked this image because upon taking it out of context, it implied way more than anything else I found. Something about it just jumped out and me, and that’s what I was looking for. The only thing I modified in my original smartphone capture was upping the contrast a little to compensate for 24 years worth of fading, and cropping out the majority of the ad (what you see is approximately an inch and a half across, and an inch down, of a full A4 ad).

This was quite a fun exercise for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Though I absolutely do not advocate for the “appropriating” of somebody else’s work, regardless of artistic intent.