Magic Castle

Magic Castle collects photographs Richard Prince made in France in the late 1960s, when he had gone to Caen as a student to study the humanities and instead spent his time in Paris visiting museums. Published by Les Presses du Réel in a French and English edition in 2014, on the occasion of an exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon.

The trip set the pattern for Prince's later travels to see major art collections firsthand. The photographs reproduced in the book show their age and Prince's own, discolored by exposure and time, unevenly lit, and framed in the offhand manner of a young tourist rather than a working photographer. They document the artist's formative years, before the appropriation-based work he is best known for.