Howard Steenwyk

Amateurs Imitate, Professionals Steal.

Photographer Patrick Cariou photographs of the Rastafarian community in Jamaica were incorporated into a series of artworks by appropriation artist Richard Prince. Prince’s works involved copying Cariou’s original photographs and reprinting, resizing, blurring, painting over with new content to transform the original image into a new image with new meaning.

The Southern District of New York (SDNY), found that the works were not transformative, in part because Richard Prince did not claim to be “commenting upon” the original works, and ordered that Prince’s unsold works, and Rizzoli’s catalogs, be impounded and destroyed.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the SDNY’s decision and ruled that 25 of 30 works of Prince’s works were indeed “transformative” to a “reasonable observer”, therefore fair use, and found works to be transformative if they presented a new aesthetic regardless if it commented on the original work or not.

With five works still in contension, Cariou and Prince announced that they had settled the case.