At the end of the 1970s in New York City, a generation of artists, later known as «The Picture Generation », submitted mixed media such as photography and film, to a radical critique and questioned post-minimalist contemporary aesthetics.

Artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine insist on the infinite reproducibility of the photographic print and, at the same time, question the organization of the photographic market guided by the effect of rarefaction, already known in drawing and in painting, for example.

If Sherrie Levine with her series entitled After Walker Evans also questions the notion of authorship in the genre by re-photographing the shots of the 20th century masters, the reproducibility of photography as put forward by Richard Prince, is associated with a bitter outlook directed at American pop-culture, going from commercials such as the Marlboro Cowboys, to underground fanzines and even pulp fiction covers, not to mention the Jokes and Cartoons series that he extracts from their contexts of magazines such as “The New Yorker” and “Playboy”.

Having profoundly influenced contemporary photography, Richard Prince is also an obsessive collector of all kinds of mass consumer products, like a Walker Evans and his taste for the vernacular. It is a great honor for the Centre de la photographie Genève to present, in a single exhibition, all publications that the artist has been able to edit during his 50 years of artistic practice.

Having already released the first catalogue raisonné of all the publications of Richard Prince (1981-2014), Christophe Daviet-Thery will be co-curator for the exhibition All Books and Some Prints that the CPG will present from January 26th, 2021 to February 28th, 2021. He will also direct the second volume of the catalogue of publications, which will be co-edited by the Centre de la photographie Genève.