Tester

collections. Perhaps the credit and
the $90,000 should go to the man
whose appearance and lifestyle,
while completely marginalized,
are aesthetically considered a hot
commodity.
Interestingly, Graham is not
the first white male artist to come
into conflict with Prince over the
use of the black male Jamaican
body. Prince recently won a fiveyear-long
legal battle with Patrick
Carou over his use of Carou’s
photography in his self-described
“meaningless” collection of work
Canal Zone. In Canal Zone, Prince
cut out and defaced pictures from
Carou’s book Yes, Rasta, an anthropological
photo essay on Rastafarian
culture in Jamaica. While many
who sided with Carou pointed out
that these photos were taken after
extensive community
engagement and research
in order to gain
the trust of people in
the culture, it’s hard to
not view the squabble
as two white men arguing
over the use of
a black man’s body.
This is not to defend
Prince, whose treatment
of the photographs could
easily be read as racist (for example,
when he enlarged the subjects’
mouths and erased their eyes). At
the time, he wrote,
I don’t want to talk about where
the Rastas came from. Like most
images I work with, they weren’t
mine. I didn’t know anything about
Rastas. I didn’t know anything
about their culture or how they
lived. I had plenty of time to find
out. What I went with was the attraction.
I liked their dreads. The
way they were dressed […] gym
shorts and flip-flops. Their look
and lifestyle gave off a vibe of
freedom. Maybe I’m wrong about
the freedom but I don’t give a shit
about being wrong.
But one of Carou’s biggest complaints
was not Prince’s disrespect,
but the fact that he lost his show at
a Paris gallery due to Prince.
For me the majority of Prince’s
New Portraits were repugnant only
in that they were symptomatic of
one the art world's greatest crimes:
body snatching. I think the term
“re-voyeurize” is important to understanding
how Prince snatches
bodies. When a photo is placed
on Instagram, it is intentional
and meant to be viewed by anyone.
There is nothing voyeuristic
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