The cowboy embodies freedom, masculinity, and individualism. He is a man beholden only to himself and is, consequently, one we are taught to envy and desire. However, the image of the American patriot in blue jeans, leather boots, and a Stetson hat is relatively new. In fact, the original cowboy wasn’t even American. The style began with the Mexican vaqueros around modern-day Texas. Even after becoming ‘Americanized’, cowboys remained a symbol of multiculturalism, with riders of all backgrounds working alongside each other. It wasn’t until John Wayne’s portrayal of the Western Byronic hero that the modern cowboy archetype was formed. While the outward appearance barely changed, its cultural significance shifted dramatically. This romanticised and commercialised icon became the catalyst for Richard Prince’s controversial Cowboys series. By re-photographing Marlboro advertisements and stripping away the brand’s logos, Prince isolates the raw, seductive imagery of the American myth. In doing so, Prince mirrors the cowboy’s own history, distilling a complex reality into a cultural ideal. This begs the question: is his series a legitimate commentary on visual myth, or a blatant case of intellectual theft?
Prince’s career began in the tear sheet department of Time Incorporated, where he was instructed to save clippings of articles for staff writers and disregard the rest. Prince, however, took an interest in the throwaway adverts in these papers, particularly Leo Burnett’s ‘Marlboro Man.’ Burnett executed one of history’s most successful ad campaigns by shifting Marlboro from a women’s brand to a symbol of hyper-masculinity, featuring cowboys defined by their self-assuredness. Prince realised that the advertisement wasn’t actually selling cigarettes; it was selling an unreachable masculine fantasy. Prince appropriated Burnett’s strategy by enlarging these grainy, distorted images and stripping away the branding to force viewers into a direct confrontation with what makes an unachievable reality so desirable.
Just as the campaign enriched Marlboro, Prince’s re-photographs eventually fetched over a million dollars apiece. However, while Marlboro’s achievements were celebrated, Prince’s were initially dismissed as blatant plagiarism rather than legitimate art. Sam Abell, a photographer for the Marlboro campaign, publicly criticised Prince for stealing his work under a false banner of originality, noting (in a 2008 interview at LOOK3 Festival) that ‘editorial photography is considered […] to be not worthy, but copied by someone else it is.’ This highlights an ongoing debate in art as to why a commercial ad is dismissed as throwaway media, while its copy sits in a museum.
When I first came across Prince’s work at the Albertina exhibition this summer in Vienna, I too was drawn in by the desirability of his images, especially the mystique and anonymity they hold. While the last century transformed the cowboy into a symbol of conservative, hyper-masculine American authority, Prince’s work subverts this stereotype by exposing the caricature upon which the myth is built. This subversion is mirrored in the modern reclaiming of cowboy culture by marginalised communities, who adopt the whitewashed archetype to capture its original sense of freedom. Ultimately, Prince’s work forces us to question the boundary between a stolen copy and a meaningful reinterpretation.
Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
