“That’s the way we want to look. To be pictured. A portrait….Maybe it’s a kind of stupid desire. Passion. Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it’s become the ‘most’ real thing. I mean, the picture I take has already been taken. I take it again. My picture is seamless. No cuts. No scissors. The camera as electronic scissors. It makes the magazine picture a photograph. The photograph is ‘close’. It’s real close. Close to the real thing.”
Jeff Rian in conversation with Richard Prince in Rosetta Brooks, et al., Richard Prince, London 2003, p.16