Untitled (girlfriend)

"Untitled (girlfriend)" is a 1993 chromogenic print by Richard Prince that demonstrates the American appropriation artist's continued engagement with the themes of desire, intimacy, and commodification in the photographic medium, the image showing a rephotographed image of a woman or "girlfriend" with the same detached irony and commercial polish that characterized his earlier work. The composition is a large chromogenic print—161.3 × 110.5 centimeters—showing a figure or scene that Prince has rephotographed from a magazine or advertisement, the rephotography creating an image that is simultaneously familiar and strange, the original context lost and the new context ambiguous. The 1993 date places this work in the period of Prince's transition from the rephotographed images to the more overtly painterly and sculptural works of his later career, the print demonstrating both his continued mastery of the photographic medium and his exploration of new thematic territory. Art historians have compared this work to the paintings of Willem de Kooning and the photographs of Nan Goldin, noting that Prince's treatment is more focused on the mediated nature of intimacy, the way that relationships are constructed and represented in popular culture, than the personal expression or the documentary realism of these other traditions.

This 1993 chromogenic print made mediated intimacy commercially detached through large-scale rephotographed girlfriend ambiguity and familiar-strange polish, using 1990s thematic transition to explore commodified relationship-construction beyond Goldin documentary realism.

It matters because Prince photographed a girlfriend and made the print feel like it was asking who she really belonged to—proving that even love could be an advertisement if the rephotography was cool enough.