RICHARD PRINCE et. al, Altered Subjects: Photography, Ben Shahn Gallery, William Paterson College, 1980

Exhibition catalogue produced for Altered Subjects: Photography, presented at the Ben Shahn Gallery, William Paterson College, Wayne, New Jersey, in March 1980. Text by Joe Kalafut. Sixteen pages, staple-bound in textured cream wrappers, 21 × 21.5 cm. Artists included: Bernard Faucon, Ralph Gibson, Don Myer, Bruce Patterson, John Pfahl, Richard Prince, Don Rodan and Victor Schrager.

The eight photographers brought together here each intervene at a different stage in the making of an image. Bernard Faucon builds scenes with mannequins before photographing them; John Pfahl makes physical additions to landscapes prior to exposure; Victor Schrager compresses objects and reproductions into constructed still life; Don Rodan works through the Polaroid SX-70 format; and Richard Prince takes photographs already circulating in commercial culture and photographs them again. The catalogue has not yet adopted the shorthand through which several of these practices would later be understood. That is precisely what makes it useful now.

Richard Prince is represented by Four Men Facing Right, 1979, four Ektacolor photographs, 16 × 20 inches each, courtesy Castelli Graphics Gallery. The short artist biography printed alongside his work records solo exhibitions with Ellen Sragow, New York, and Galerie Jöllenbeck, Cologne — exhibitions that do not appear in Prince's current selected chronology, which opens with Artists Space and CEPA Gallery in 1980. The Sragow exhibitions are documented elsewhere: Workout (March 1976), In Complete Control (September–October 1976) and The Author (November–December 1977). An early Metro Pictures biography similarly lists Sragow, Artists Space, CEPA and Jöllenbeck together.

Later institutional accounts are not consistent on this point. MoMA's 1992 publication Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing describes Prince's advertising photographs as “first shown at the Galerie Jollenbeck, Cologne, in 1978,” while characterising his 1980 exhibitions at Artists Space and CEPA as his “first one-man exhibitions.” In 1980, Altered Subjects records Sragow, Jöllenbeck and Artists Space as part of the same continuous solo exhibition history. By 1992, that history was already being described differently. The catalogue preserves a contemporaneous version of the record before those distinctions had settled.

Douglas Crimp's Pictures exhibition had taken place at Artists Space in 1977; Prince was not included, though questions around photographic reproduction and appropriation were already in circulation. Here he appears simply as one photographer among eight, before the category with which his work would become associated had fully formed. Production credits: photographs by David Horton; printer Carol Huebner; faculty design supervisor Chuck Magistro; design and layout Gregg Lee.

Condition: general age-toning and light handling to the textured cream wrappers, with minor edge wear and surface transfer or scuffing to the rear. Internally well preserved throughout.