Richard Prince’s Untitled (Publicity) juxtaposes one of his most iconic images—that of the Marlboro Cowboy—with two publicity photographs of topless cowgirls. The cowboy photograph on the left exhibits Prince’s famed ‘rephotography’, a technique in which the artist photographs an advertisement—presently a Marlboro ad—and reoffers it as high art. A response to American consumerism and identity, Prince’s focus on Cowboys aimed to scrutinise the notions surrounding originality and authorship, and to deconstruct the privileged status of the unique art object. Prince began rephotographing these advertisement images after the Marlboro Man stopped being used in marketing materials for the cigarette brand. As Prince recalls, ‘without him as an identifying factor, it was easier to present these pictures as something other than they were.’ (Lisa Phillips, Richard Prince, New York, 1992, p. 95). Fittingly, his found publicity photographs, here pin-up Betty Page photographed by Bunny Yeager, and pop musician Sheryl Crow, take on new scrutiny and symbology when presented and framed alongside his own rephotograph, a reconstructed and appropriated version of truth. With the repetition of the cowgirl emphasised, these images explore the meaning behind ‘truth’ in pop culture, and thus are repositioned in order to reveal their collective superficiality. When considered alongside each other, one is able to draw comparisons between the ‘Marlboro Man’—an exaggerated, hyper-masculine icon as depicted by the all-American cowboy—and the pin-up girl—an overly sexualised and fetishised version of the all-American girl.

The merging of these three images thus perfectly capture Prince’s term ‘Spiritual America’, a sense of unattainable glamour: “‘Spiritual America addresses that broad cultural yearning for something more—and how it is often expressed in the most tawdry, illicit manner…the image has come to embody that strangely motivating desire on the part of the viewer to know, to have, and even to be the person in the frame.” (Nancy Spector, Richard Prince, 2008, p. 79)