By Richard Prince: A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Garry Gross

Richard Prince re-photographed this image of actress Brooke Shields after it had been embroiled in a two-year battle over copyright. Shields’s mother (who was also her manager) had sued the original photographer, Garry Gross, to reclaim rights to the image, which he shot in 1975 for the Playboy publication Sugar and Spice and subsequently reproduced. Gross eventually won, claiming that Shields had made a lucrative career as the “Lolita of her generation.” Only ten years old at the time of the photograph, Shields glistens with oil, standing seductively, in a bathtub, with heavily made-up eyes and pouty lips. Her body echoes the nude sculptures elsewhere in the frame, implying that the image fits squarely within the genre of the female nude, which indeed has a long tradition of sexualizing young girls. Prince anonymously exhibited this appropriated photograph —unchanged from the original except for its larger scale—at a Lower East Side gallery in 1983, where it was the sole work on display, and viewing was by invitation only. Though the image was already familiar to many visitors, the secretive and exclusive context that Prince created made it somehow even more salacious. Viewers were thereby rendered complicit in the work’s controversy and in Shields’s exploitation, and forced to confront—or at least acknowledge—their desire to encounter the image.