Richard Prince "Night Club Nurse" Mixed Media 2007

Richard Prince (born 1949, in the Panama Canal Zone now Panama) is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a "rephotograph" of a photograph taken originally by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigaretteadvertisement, was the first "rephotograph" to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005.

Starting in 1977, Prince photographed four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times. This process of re-photographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross's photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of middle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humor.

After living in New York City for 25 years, Prince moved to upstate New York. His mini-museum, Second House, purchased by the Guggenheim Museum, was struck by lightning and burned down shortly after the museum purchased the House (which Richard had created for himself), having only stood for six years, from 2001 to 2007. Prince now lives and works in New York City.

He was first interested in the art of the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. "I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative." Prince grew up during the height of Pollock's career, making his work accessible. The 1956 Timemagazine article dubbing Pollock "Jack the Dripper" made the thought of pursuing art as career possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18.

He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine. He describes his school as without grades or real structure. From Maine he was drawn to New York City. Prince has said that his attraction to New York was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as "a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio."

Prince's first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, New York. His short book Menthol Pictures was published as part of the residency.

In late 2007, Prince had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a comprehensive show hung in chronological order along the upward spiraling walls. The show continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, asserted, "He is absolutely essential to what's going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It's not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives."

Prince has built up a large collection of Beat books and papers. Prince owns several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac's mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty character in the book), with Cassady’s signature and marginal notes.

Describing his career and methodology in a 2005 New York magazine interview, Prince said, "It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things."