It’s hard to tell what killed photography… whether it was the advent of the camera phone, the “pocket gallery” that is social media, or the thousands of men taking softcore images of hot women in lingerie and calling it art. These horsemen of the photography apocalypse were all put to trial when Emily Ratajkowski went up against acclaimed artist and professional troll, Richard Prince, after he featured one of her Instagram photos in an art exhibition in New York. An image she went on to purchase for $80,000. While Prince’s “Instagram Paintings” series seems at best lazy and at worst sleazy, it raises fascinating questions about the state of photography as an art form. Photography has always had problems with authorship, but social media has thrown that into crisis. Once a photograph reaches the internet, is it yours any longer? Is it even a photograph at all? Hannah and Maia are joined by photographer and friend Stefan Johnson to discuss all this and more in this episode, embarking on tangents such as: what comprises a “Brat summer”, and Maia being too optimistic about Love Island UK.

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Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills:

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SOURCES:

Walter Benjamin, “'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935).

Liz Linden, “Reframing Pictures: Reading the Art of Appropriation” Art Journal, vol. 75, No. 4 (2016).

W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn” Artforum (1992).

Sabine Niederer, “Networked Images: Visual methodologies for the digital age”, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (2018).

Lizzie Plaugic, “The story of Richard Prince and his $100,000 Instagram art” The Verge (2015).

Emily Ratajkowski, “Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?” Vulture (2020).

David Robbins, “Richard Prince: An Interview by David Robbins” Aperture , FALL 1985, No. 100, The Edge of Illusion (FALL 1985).

Peter Schjeldahl, “Richard Prince’s Instagrams” The New Yorker (2014).

Giulia Turbiglio, “A Brief History of Richard Prince’s Instagram” Artuner.