Richard Prince: Untitled (couple)

One Work is a unique series of books published by Afterall, with each presenting a single work of art considered in detail by a single author. The primary aim of the series is to provoke debate about significant moments in contemporary art's recent development.

By rephotographing an image from a magazine to make his 1977 work Untitled (couple), Richard Prince extracted the uncanny from the generic, locating the mysterious essence hidden behind the veil of advertisement. Working as a photo archivist at Time Life, Prince conceived his first body of appropriated work in 1977, creating what he would later dub "rephotography"—eliminating all surrounding text and imagery that would contextualize the image as an ad. In the process, Prince updated the readymade for the late 1970s and early 1980s, an age in which the image was the be-all and end-all.

Drawing on an unpublished interview with Richard Prince, Michael Newman analyses this seminal work, connecting it to ideas of allegory, simulacrum, and the formation of personal identity in a society of commodity and spectacle. Newman argues that the vintage TV series The Twilight Zone is crucial to understanding Prince's use of images. During the 1960s, structuralism recast the image as text Prince's work, Newman argues, revived the image in such a way that it is irreducible to text. The series questions issues of mass consumerism, reality vs. fiction in advertising, and identity formation in a commodity culture.

Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) is a member of the Pictures Generation of artists that emerged in the 1980s. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Goetz Collection (Munich), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).