"Most of what's passing for information right now is total fiction," Richard Prince observed. "I try to turn the lie back on itself," (R. Prince, quoted in K. McKenna, 'On Photography: Looking for Truth Between the Lies', Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1985, p. 91).
In the spring of 1983, newspapers were extensively reporting on the legal battle over a series of Brooke Shields photos taken in 1976, when the actress was ten years old. Shields' mother Teri was contesting the rights of the commercial photographer, Gary Gross, to publish the images as posters although she had signed a release form giving him unlimited rights (for a fee of $450) at the time of the shoot.
Gross had photographed Brooke when she was still an unknown child model, using the images in a self-published booklet entitled Little Women and in the Playboy Press book Sugar & Spice: Surprising and Sensuous Images of Women. Two years later, Shields was catapulted to fame for her role as a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby, followed by the sensuous film Blue Lagoon in 1980, and the provocative advertising campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans in which the then-15-year-old asks: "You know what comes between me and my Calvin's? Nothing!"
Gross's lawyers argued that his photographs could not damage Shields' reputation because she had since established a lucrative career based on her profile as a sex symbol. The judge concurred and ruled that children cannot break a contract signed by a parent or guardian. That decision was overturned by an appeals court, but in 1983 the original verdict in Gross' favour was upheld.
Prince was drawn to the controversy surrounding the ownership of these images and, as they were never reproduced in the reportage, he set out to find out what the fuss was about. "Without a visual reference I had no way of telling who was right, who was wrong...everything seemed clandestine. Cold war. Paranoid. Skeletons in a closet. Bad penny. I needed a picture instead of words. I needed visual proof," he recently wrote on his blog (R. Prince, 'Birdtalk', March 27, 2014, accessed via www.richardprince.com, April 6, 2014).
He managed to borrow a copy of the Little Women booklet from a friend working at a photography agency and was astounded by what he found: "There was Brooke standing in a tub completely naked with her arms outstretched like she was Jesus on the cross...her boy body oiled and shiny, with just the tiniest bit of make-up on her cheeks and rouge on her lips. The image hit me.
It was "alive." Where did it come from? Who was its maker? It wasn't born. It was fully formed. There was no history to the image, no future. Independent and on its own...free from any and all authorship [...] This was what all the 'hub-bub' was about. I got it. And of course I agreed. This was a 'complicated' photograph. This no longer had anything to do with money or censorship or even embarrassment. For me this photograph had to do with the medium and how the medium can get out of hand," (R. Prince, ibid.).
In keeping with his existing process for the advertisement-based photographs, Prince shot the reproduced image on slide film, documenting the picture as if it were an object, a cultural artifact or a still life. Within a few days he blew the slightly cropped picture up into an 8 x 10 inch print and decided that it would be the centerpiece for his next show. The work would not be fully realized, however, until the image was bestowed with its title, which he discovered at a photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum around the same time. Prince then presented the gold-framed work alone in a store-front gallery space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which he also named 'Spiritual America.'
The installation of the invite-only show almost took on the shape of a performance as it deliberately compromised the supposed neutrality of the gallery space and put normally passive art observers in the position of voyeurs. As Rosetta Brookes remembers: "Visitors were made to feel complicit in a crime. As a result of the hearsay or art world gossip and staged controversy, the very act of visiting the show forced every viewer to overstep the normal threshold of indifference (the gallery), denying us the objectivity we are usually allowed to adopt [...] Prince's action was criminally simple: by exhibiting the photo he made it an overt cover for a range of non-aesthetic responses, from mild curiosity to scopophilia. By opening the gallery for the sole reason of showing this one photo, Prince ensured that there was no other reason for visiting the gallery other than to see a picture of the naked Brooke Shields as a child," (R. Brooks, 'Spiritual America: No Holds Barred', Richard Prince, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992, pp. 88-90).
For the duration of the exhibition, Prince was conspicuously absent, leaving only a receptionist to deal with the profusion of rumors, innuendo, and largely unsubstantiated reports that swirled around it. The event incited a cause clbre amongst New York's art scene and the debate over what the artwork means, what is suggests and what it may or may not represent continues to this day. Of course the representation of sexualized young girls has long been the stuff of art, theatre, literature and film. Paul Gauguin's Polynesian muses, Edvard Munch's anxious pubescent girls, and the boundary-pushing poses rendered by Balthus are just a few examples of painterly erotic allusions thinly disguised by a veneer of over-sentimental innocence. Yet the aesthetic removal necessitated by painting is largely dissolved in the realm of photography as the reality of the sitter is undeniable; hence the outrage over such varied works as Lewis Carroll's 1858 portrait of Alice Liddell, the family portraits of American photographer Sally Mann, and Annie Leibovitz's 2008 portrait of Miley Cyrus for Vanity Fair. Perhaps the girls' seemingly come hither gazes-more than any exposed -is what viewers find so alluring and unsettling in these images. They are scandalized by being forced to engage with the subject like the first viewers of Manet's knowing Olympia were.
via Christies 